Taming harshness/listener fatigue in a room

Also taping some acoustic insulation inside your horns. It smooths out the brassy sound that horns produce.

 

Thanks Paul. I've gotten so much help form this forum, I wanted to give back if I could. I really enjoy the Focals and am kinda itching to get some bigger ones! They just seem to do everything well for me, at least in my room with my equipment. I hope you get a chance to listen to some. The Pro-Ject table has been very reliable for me, and the Red cartridge seems pretty neutral to my ears...definitely not smooth, but not harsh or excessively bright either. I thought about moving up to the Blue, but I have a lot of hours left on the Red...not sure if the Blue would help with the music I listen to. Best of luck, Paul!

 

EVA (Ethylene Vinil Acetate). The kind used for yoga mats.

 

A or C weighted ?

 

Really you shouldn't expose yourself to 100db levels for long. You will damage your ears.

 

Rule 1: Klipsch speakers demand clean amplification. They demand clean source components and recordings. They faithfully reproduce what they're fed. Those same Klipsch Quartets work fine in my application, and my system plays little metal and lower volume. I also keep them to less than 50 watts/channel quality, clean amplification in good order. Also, a likely bet your crossovers have very tired electrolytic capacitors. The Sansui 2000 should sing with Klipsch Quartets very well, a pair of loaner Chorus did great with a Sansui 4000 in my living room, and a MA 5100 shined. These had a Crites rebuilt crossover and the titanium elements. I also recommend experimenting with corner placement with them, the Klipsch speakers benefit from corners.

 

Hi, I signed up just to reply to this because some of the information here is so bad. I have built and designed several speakers over the years for the purpose of listening to metal, including horn based designs. A lot of what people assume about this subject is wrong.

The thought of listening to metal through something like klipsch speakers makes me cringe. They are highly directional and "hard" sounding. Combine that with music that is often recorded poorly, and mastered by people with hearing damage and its not going to work.

The upper midrange is often too loud in the recording and this is exactly the spot when the speaker starts "shouting" at you. It might sound very clear and exciting at first but it will be fatiguing. The typical home theater type speakers that people recommend are often the worst choices for this type of music.

I would also stay away from hard materials in general, and look to paper drivers and soft domes or ribbon tweeters.

I would look at or build some higher dispersion speakers, with smaller drivers and a something like a soft dome. What is important is a flat response in the 1-8khz region and rolled off bass down to 40 hz or so (depends on room). I would not go full omni directional though as these will lose the imaging and spatial information that is in the recording.

If you have to use horns then I would recommend sitting far away from them in a highly reverberant room. This will help take the edge off. Also angling them away can help. Clean source matters a lot with these type of speakers because its a more direct sound. In certain set ups horns or compression drivers can work, but I would at least make sure its a soft diaphragm in there.

One thing to keep in mind is that the room matters a lot. A high dispersion speaker that is crowded in a corner will sound bad regardless. They need breathing room for the sound to "bloom". Also how far away you are and many other things influence the sound.

As a general rule for all types of music you want to avoid early reflections and get the right balance between direct and indirect sound. I would stay away from home theater type set ups for metal as these are just too direct sounding.

 

YOU make me cringe

 

A couple of observations, as a Klipsch legacy speaker owner.

the best way to tame your Quartets is to run them with tube amplification. That will take away your harshness right away.

The Quartets are all right for metal. There is nothing wrong with horn speaker's and metal. If you go to a rock concert and listen to Metal, then you will most likely be listening through horn P.A. speaker's.

Upgrading your crossover's would help improve them all the way around.

This is the ALK Universal Economy Crossover network you need to upgrade you Heresy's. These crossover's are an UPGRADE to your stock crossover's. A pair of these custom built crossover's will only set you back $320, plus shipping and are built to order by ALK Engineering.



I have vintage Altec's and I use ALK crossover's that are designed for legacy Klipsch La Scala speaker's on them. They are the BEST!



Legacy Klipsch designs, like legacy Altec's should be run only from tube amplification, IMO.

 

Upgrading your crossover is a stupid waste of money, and clearly a shameless promotion. You're not going to do a better a job than the people who designed them in the first place.
You'd be much better off using a PC based equalizer like equalizer APO than getting different amps or crossovers or any of the nonsense being suggested here.

 

BTW, Maroon five or whatever you listen to is not metal. I love metal but face facts, it can be harsh. Some of this is opinion but with all the great speaker designs out there I would choose something other than big titanium CD horns, at least if you're within 20 ft.

 

It appears that our New Member is full of information.

 

I don't listen to Maroon Five. I listen to mainly punk and extreme subgenres of metal, which are the harshest (black, death, thrash, industrial, and all things with the ¨core¨ suffix atached to them) No fatigue with my modern Klipsch floorstanders and vintage Pioneer receiver, unless the source is a complete mess, in which case I have plenty of signal processing at hand to tame the harshness. Klipsch and metal were MEANT to go hand in hand. The fact that you don't like them doesn't entitle you to utter such lapidary statements on the brand.

That said; who do you think you are to pass these kind of judgements ?!

 

There are some really nice tube amps and such out there but when people have problems its usually the room.

There's nothing wrong with the brand, but CD horns would not be my first choice, particularly if you are sitting close. BTW those metal cone drivers can be just as bad as the compression drivers for fatigue depending on how they are crossed.
I get sick of hearing how you should buy cerwin vegas or klipsch for hardcore music when if anything you want something more like harbeth.

 

I few of us find that pairing up high sensitivity speaker's with tube amplification, will go a long way to taming harshness that is inherent with many SS amps when used with speaker's with sensitivity.

There are issues that can be attributed to room acoustics and those that are not directly related. Any speaker, when used in a room, is subject to the acoustical characteristics of that room.

 

OK; point taken. But that's you. I really dislike the Cerwin sound but Klipsch ? They're rock speakers. And yes, they double as great HT speakers as well. There's nothing wrong with CD horns if they're well implemented. And Klipsch excel at it, even on the lower lines. Sure; they sound their best only at the sweet spot, but the sound is less affected by room boundaries. BTW, my room is fully treated.

I dunno what kind of metal YOU listen too (guessin' Scorpions and Judas Priest here), but my guess is it doesn't get anywhere near the intensity my metal reaches.

 

Just took the video for a spin, the first 15 min, yep! sounds fantastic on my little near field setup. I cranked it, intense as hell, no harshness whatsoever! (given the you tube 360p rez) Any good system should reproduce quality metal, well mastered, with fidelity and power. (If Mozart were alive today he would be a metalhead) Now, the sacrificial images are not my cup of tea, but this band absolutely rocks!

 

Thanx ! I own the DVD of this, and it sounds terrific, flat through my floorstanders. Kudos for enduring 15' of this. The people on the crosses are models hired for the occasion; funny thing is, as the gig progresses, the crosses get emptier, for the models couldn't withstand either their positions or the volume. It is indeed a very good-sounding DVD.

 

Cewwin Vega and Klipsch don't belong in the same paragraph.

They are totally different speakers with nothing in common.

From the CV web site; "you know it's the vibrant and body shaking experience of a pro sound system that makes it sensational".

Yes, they do make a lot of bass, but that is about all that they do well.

 

EXACTLY my point. Lots of innacurate boom, muddy mids, inexistant highs.

 

Apologies if this has been said already...
You have first reflection point covered, you have front wall behind speakers covered and some make shift bass traps... its a good start but i think you are hearing rear wall floor and ceiling reflections more now and it could be the problem lies there. Of course if they are soft surfaces then its something else.

My room had a horrible mid/high freq bouncy buzzing sound (very harsh razor distortion) on a clap or balloon pop test which was still there even after completely covering the side walls (and a bit of front wall) floor to ceiling with 70 - 140 mm thick rockwool panels... ceiling treatment was not an option... i put a large rug on the floor... buzz gone

 

To this day no one has solved the "mystery" of tube amps and why some people seem to prefer them. Most likely its the even order harmonic distortion that they produce as opposed to the odd order kinds found in other gear.

Probably the even order distortion gives a warmer overall tone that can take the edge off of the odd order distortion that hard materials like glass and metal can produce.

A nice tube amp is expensive but might be worthwhile for some, especially for headphone listeners.

Actually they are both compression driver horns with fairly large drivers and that means similar dispersion characteristics, JBL also makes speakers like this. I don't any of them are well suited to hardcore music because they give too much direct sound. It depends too how they are set up and whether there are early reflections.

This is where things can get tricky. Because if your room has bad acoustics, like say u live in large drain pipe, hypothetically. Then you're better off with more direct sound and trying to deaden the room.

Also if you are in a very cramped space and have things near the speakers, then you're better off with more direct sound (avoid early reflections). One way to deal with this is the extreme toe in set up where each speaker is pointed at the opposite room corner. This is popular with the "constant directivity" horns popularized by people like Geddes, Duke Lejeune, and Wayne Parnam (Pi speakers).

These kinds of horns have good clean off axis response so you can angle them away without sounding strange. The econowave was a diy horn design Zilch's AK Design Collaborative - Econowave Speaker

Speakers that have flatter response off axis are now considered better anyways, and most modern designers try to have good off axis anyways. This is because reverberant sound matters a lot (I'm aure many people here know this already)

If you have a decent room and can put some space around the speakers then you will probably find higher dispersion sounds better or at least less fatiguing overall. The reflections reduce the "shout" from the speaker and take the edge off the sound.

Direct sound is better for intense home theater like experiences where you want dialogue to be very clean and in your face. This isn't as good for music especially bad recordings or listening for long periods.

As confusing as all this sounds it seems to boil down to some simple principles. But the room matters a lot and people do get misled thinking that they need expensive wires of something else.

 

CWs don't have horns ; they feature soft domes inside waveguides that LOOK like horns (dull for metal and punk), not compression drivers inside actual horns like Klipsch do. I love the bite of those, GO KLIPSCH !!

 

He's full of something, all right...