This funny

Radrog,

Thats quite normal - it is a perfectly good tweeter (Vifa XT25TG30). Tweeters don't do much - despite all the fuss people tend to make. Hopefully you have good expensive midrange and bass woofers, as that matters a great deal - good starts around $300+ for a good mid and good woofer and may cost up to about $1000. Excellent subwoofer drivers can cost up to $2K. All much less than the overall cost of your speakers but they can still be excellent quality.

I was able to order it localy from a company...it costed 60.00!!?? a 60.00 woofer out of a 10,000 pair of speakers!!

That is why consumer speakers look "stunning"! Cheap drivers but beautiful (and expensive) cabinets. Partly they must fulfill an aesthetic roll as nice furniture and the manufacturers know that few customers will open the box to find a woefully cheap driver with a miniscule magnet and voice coil.

That is also why professional speakers may look butt-ugly but can sound significantly better. Instead of great veneer and aesthetics - a proportionally higher part of the cost will go into the drivers, which are expected to perform better and with lower distortion at higher SPL's.

Of course this is a generalization - there are plenty of exceptions in both camps - but, in general, each target market gets what it desires most...pros impress their friends with loud, dynamic and precise sound whilst consumers will tend to dwell on the overall balance of the design, which includes the aesthetics as much as the value of the sound.

All to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with ML speakers - they still sound good and look stunning!

For the money the speakers cost to purchase Krell should of gave them to me for free.

I think that is unfair to Krell...the aluminum cabinets are EXTREMELY expensive...especially if you consider the small sales volumes of this a higly exclusive 'statement" speaker! Sure a pro speaker with thick heavily braced MDF cabinets (cheap but functional) with pro drivers can sound better and cost less but it is going to be butt-ugly!

A pro driver will look beefy when you pop it out - Like these small 3 inch drivers, the one on the left with a 7" & 18 pound magnet . If you place the smaller pro 3 inch driver along side a tweeter you get the idea of "beef". Now if you think that 3 inch driver with a 7 inch 18 pound magnet is big then you need to look at pro woofers - now those are big and heavy (up to 40+ lbs each - I think TC sounds holds heavy weight record)!

It's akin to a commercial lawn mower intended for use 8 hours a day five days a week versus a residential mower designed for 1or 2 hours once a week.

Onhwy61,

Good analogy. "Horses for Courses" - each designed for a different job.

most tweaks and cable claims are just plain marketing hype and a complete sham.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned.

Perhaps, just maybe, collectively audiophiles tend to get what they merit - lets face it, manufacturers are only around if they are sustainably successful! Making & selling beautiful luxurious "eye candy" with run-of-the-mill outsourced mass produced materials/parts is a solid sustainable business model for this industry. The high cost of beautiful cabinet work (exotic veneers) and stunning brushed metal face plates is highly appreciated by everyone, as is the value of precious metals such as Gold & Silver used in cables, as are monsterous technical hyperbole used to create the illusion of exclusive technology from what are largely off-the-shelf parts! High performance and costly but obscure aspects of the design (such as a short voice coil in a long magnetic gap) will only ever be appreciated by a small minority.

That's life! There is nothing shocking about this - it is just the reality of the high end audio market segmentation - no amount of crying or wailing will change this. Hardly anyone wants to plop $20K on a butt-ugly speaker because it happens to sound exceptionally good. It must first and foremost look damned good for that kind of money - sound will be a secondary consideration for most buyers even if they will never admit it (not even too themselves)!

Funny because we will still have "Audiophiles" listen with the Eyes not their EARS!!

That is the whole reason why it makes more sense for a manufacturer to add some nice cosmetic styling and a nice veneer on a speaker rather than throw money into better quality woofers.

For example some line array speakers that have 20 drivers per side can cost about 10 to 30 bucks a driver, and cost you 20 to 30 grand!!

Yes indeed, but it is very comforting for the customer to be able to count the impressive number of woofers for his 20 Grand! Make no mistake about it, even casual non-audiophile friends will almost certainly be impressed by a speaker with 20 drivers per side. (Irrelevant that the drivers might have cost, on average, $20 each.) The same casual friends would probably not even notice a much more ordinary looking speaker with a single larger and slightly more costly $500 woofer, a $500 mid and a $50 tweeter. If you told your casual friends the cost of the ordinary looking speaker they would probably laugh. However, they would not be at all surprised to learn that the 20 driver tower cost as much as 20K becuase it look like it should cost that much!

Perception is everything.