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Review 4 of 109
Price Paid:
$1000.00
from Craigslist Summary:
I live in both New York City and PA. I have, over the years, picked up some great stuff on New York City streets. Recently, however, I came across a gold mine. While walking on the Upper East Side (and some of you are going to hate me for this), I saw a pair of Marantz Model 9 tube amplifiers, a Marantz Model 7 tube preamplifier, and a Scott tube tuner, all original, sitting next to the recycling on the sidewalk. It was 6:00pm and sleeting. I was late for a dinner date. I hailed a cab and stored the equipment in the trunk of a friend's car for the evening. For $2,000.00, I am having the equipment repaired and may use it, or may sell it (as the three Marantz pieces are worth around $20,000.00). I mention all of this because, although I am considering upgrading to new McIntosh tube gear, I will be curious to hear what the Marantz tube equipment sounds like with my Klipschorns--as it is difficult sometimes to imagine that they could ever sound more lifelike.
I am not an audiophile; but I go to a lot of live concerts, have listened to a lot of high-end audio equipment, and I used to own a disco; so I have heard a lot of music, both live and reproduced. I bought Klipschorns ten months ago, and am using 1980s McIntosh gear —a solid state 50 watt amp, preamp, and MR78 tuner. (My CD player, until I can afford to upgrade, is a 5-year-old piece of Sony junk.) I first heard Klipschorns in the 1970s, and was taken with them, but, living in a small New York apartment, I never thought I would own them.
My wife and I bought a large 19th-century house in PA a few years ago, which needed a lot of work. One of the things that sold me on it, though, was that it had a perfect room for K-Horns (15 x 20 feet, with good corners, wide-plank hardwood floors, and a 10 foot ceiling. So, after a year or so, I planted the K-Horn seed. My wife was not happy, to say the least. She grew up in a family that listened to music, and her father, a weekend classical pianist, had bought Klipsch heritage speakers, so she was not against good audio equipment; and she loves music. But NEVER-EVER, as long as we were married, she told me, would I be allowed to bring into the house these speakers that looked like ugly refrigerators.
I persisted. I was going to put them in my study (my room). I convinced her that we should buy them used and give them a shot to see what we thought of them; and that, if we did not like them, we could easily resell them for whatever they cost. She finally understood, with my obsession with the K-Horns, that they were eventually going to end up at the door, no matter how much she objected. Still, she shuddered at the thought.
To give her a taste of their magic, I took her with me to listen to the K-Horns at an audio store. I had ordered a pair of Grado GS-1000 headphones (absolutely sublime, by the way), and they had come in; so she agreed to go with me to pick up the Grados, and to give the K-Horns a whirl. The Klipschorns were set up close together in a basement space with a 7-foot ceiling, and they were not sealed to the corners. The salesman said they were not very good, as he fired them up — and, in those conditions, he was right. Frankly, I was a little shocked at how bad they sounded. Having not heard them in at least a decade, I thought that I had been wrong about them. The Klipschorns sounded compressed and shrill. The instruments were there but separated. The music did not come together. My wife, newly empowered with her experience of these hideous looking, mediocre sounding, and hideously large behemoths, was utterly convinced that I should never get them. She said that their weaknesses far outweighed their strengths. She referred to them as "unnecessary"; "huge, ugly robots"; and “the Hummers of speakers."
I tried to tell her that the K-Horns need room to breathe — to air out: they need cubic footage, and they need to be sealed to the corners. I told her it was unfair — that under those conditions, the Klipschorns were like lions in a cage. Well, she did not believe me. A few months later, however, a pair of K-Horns came up on Craigslist for $1,000.00. (I discovered them on my birthday, so it was definitely an omen.) They were "fixer-uppers." I told her that if we hated them, they could be resold. To put it mildly, she very, very, very reluctantly acquiesced.
They came into the house one Saturday morning in May: made in 1959, they were beat up, had torn grills and missing side panels, and they were ugly as sin. (Believe me; they look even bigger and uglier when they are in the middle of your dining room.) My wife's face was as sour as I have ever seen it. "Don't worry," I assured her, "they will disappear in the corners." She scowled and left the room. (I thought we were headed for divorce.) Working quietly, I replaced a torn woofer, and hooked up one speaker exactly where it stood. I put on Peggy Lee's "Fever." From the first note, my wife was drawn from the kitchen. Her mouth dropped open. Smiling, she was in awe and disbelief. "Turn it up," she said.
She then proceeded to pull out some of her favorite CDs and we listened in mono for the whole afternoon. (I was building bookcases in my study, so we could not install the K-Horns for a couple of weeks.) When my contractor came over, he bragged that his son had "the best Bose system," and, since I had boarded one corner of built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookcases I had just finished building (so that I could push a K-Horn against them), he wanted me to "Play some music, so that I can see what all the fuss is about." I put something on (again, only one speaker in the middle of the room), and, after the first couple of notes, he said, "OK. I understand now. This aint Bose. This is a whole other level!"
And it is.
Since then, I have placed the Klipschorns in their corners, and my wife treats "the Twins," as she calls affectionately calls them, as members of the family. She doesn't even want me to upgrade them with ALK crossovers, Trachorns, and new Beyma tweeters (nor does she want me to refinish them). (Maybe I will repost after those upgrades.) Sure, they're still ugly. But she likes them in their original, beat-up state. "They're not pretty," she has said. "But they definitely deliver."
And they do.
The K-Horns do exactly what they were designed to do, and they do it better than anything she or I have ever heard. Now, my wife is their staunchest supporter when friends come over and remark that, with speakers this big, I “must be overcompensating for something.” She tells them to sit in the sweet spot and listen. (One of the K-Horns’ drawbacks is that they have a very narrow sweet spot.) And visitors always come around. They dance; they exclaim; they cannot believe it.
What cannot be overemphasized about the K-Horns, however, is that they need proper placement. They are damn temperamental. They reveal bad recordings and bad equipment. When set up, as they are in my study, in a room with wood floors (as well as solid wood walls behind the plaster), a wide wall, and tall ceilings, they can deliver a dynamic, front-row-center performance that uncannily reproduces, as close as I have ever heard, the experience of live performers in a range of different spaces — from a small jazz club to Carnegie Hall. And they can do this with very low wattage, as long as it is CLEAN power. (In my space, with my 50 watt McIntosh amp, we get rock-concert, ear-bleeding levels with the volume set at eleven-o-clock.) No other speaker I have heard can match the full-range richness and emotional depth of the K-Horns. No other speaker I have heard can reproduce the sense — the emotional rush — of a live performance. And the K-Horns do it with finesse, reproducing a kettle drum, a pipe organ, and a cannon shot, as well as a triangle, a cymbal, and woodwinds, with accuracy, transparency, spaciousness, and detail. Bass is full, deep, tight — never overstated; voices, especially female opera singers, are Strengths:
Extremely sensitive and can produce concert-level loudness and dynamic pressence with very low watts. (Read above.) Weaknesses:
Big. Heavy. Ugly. Demanding. Unforgiving. May cause divorce. May cause loss of hearing. May bring the police to your door.
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