Klipsch Forte ii too bright, or is it my room ?


Help? Certain music makes my ears hurt from my bright sounding Klipsh Forte ii's (Sonny Rollins Saxophone Colossus), Or is it my room full of glass and tile? Or am I listening too loud (80 db), or my 1970's Pioneer receiver? I just ordered some dynamat to put on the rear of the horns. Some music is good though. I have often though about getting another pair of speakers so I can switch back and forth or run all four depending on the music. Any advise?
128x128peterjc

Showing 2 responses by lemonhaze

OP OK, The smart advice here is to treat the room. Know that all rooms need treatment. It’s a fact and I’ll say it again: all rooms need treatment, even the Royal Albert Hall, London had to have massive diffusers installed to get rid of the echo.

It was said that at RAH you could hear any concert twice :-)

The suggestion to add curtains and rugs will help a little but they are only narrow band absorbers and serve to unbalance the sound. What is needed is broad-band absorption and bass traps. You mention a mortgage so consider some easy and inexpensive DIY.

This will be cheaper than buying new stuff to try out. The problem is the sound is taking too long to decay. No EQ or similar device can reduce the echo. EQ can’t do anything to help overlong decay but can tweak a good room to compensate for electronics or speaker performance. I have never needed to resort to this band-aid.

I strongly urge you to look into room treatment regardless of choice of speaker. Like EQ, no speaker can control it’s own decay and this will plague any speaker in your room. So do not change your speaker or amp yet. Dial in the room first

I can go on at length explaining how to measure (simple) your room’s performance for the cost of a microphone for less than $100 but if this is not your thing then I will not waste our time. I assure you that if you could magically clap your hands and suddenly hear your existing system in your room with correct treatment you would be stunned at the results. It really is a big deal.

The advice to improve the crossover and damp the horns is solid but only after the room is sorted out. Any XO upgrade will be lost in the confusion of sound bouncing uncontrolled around your room, obscuring detail with bass nodes causing huge peaks and nulls. Nulls? caused by nodes cancelling which of course can’t be brought back with EQ

What you can try is a trick I sometimes use for piercing highs and that is to place vertically a 4" sponge paint roller obtainable from hardware outlets in the mouth of the horn/s. What this does is slightly attenuate and diffuse the horn output. I can offer lots of advice on how to improve the low cost XO. but you guessed it: Room First.
@sns, as there is radio silence from the OP I would like to ask you about the caps in your XO that I saw when looking at photos of your system. It looks like you have Audyn and Jupiter. How did you come to choose these over say Mundorf  or Duelund?