@rankaudio wrote:
I sat down with a tri-amped pair of AL6's with SS for the low end and tubes for the mids and highs and they sounded very sterile, dull, flat and lifeless, lacking warmth and depth.
Fairly recently listening to the actively configured Klipsch Jubilee's (with what appears to be the same DSP unit used with the La Scala AL6's), I wasn't impressed either. It's not that they didn't show potential (in particular the large MF/HF horn), but overall they sounded flat, lacked focus and were uninvolving. A lot of things could account for this and may not relate directly to the design itself, but there was a lot to deal with.
In large part the placement of the Jubilee's where I heard them was an issue, and the listening room was likely too small as well, but that wasn't all of it. Klipsch is known to cut corners with their chosen drivers (while the horn-loaded La Scala woofers in the previous models looked kinda flimsy, they were actually very well suited to the design), i.e.: the mids and HF compression drivers and not least the horns themselves, and this holds them back from being really good (mind you, the MF/HF driver in the Jubilee's is great though; a slightly modified Celestion Axi2050 with a Klipsch label). That makes me suspect they cheaped out on the DSP unit as well, and this is not trivial.
It amazes me how expensive all this stuff is and I've heard systems costing just a few thousand dollars total that sounded much nicer. DSP just kills the tone and airiness of tubes.
It's not DSP per se; it's, by all accounts, that Klipsch is using a mediocre one. DSP's come in lots of different shapes and qualities, and if you go cheap with the DSP you're lowering the potential of the sound accordingly. Use a great DSP on the other hand (aided by measurements and eventually tuned-by-ear filter settings) and there's nothing remotely stale, flat or lifeless about it.
As long as the wealthy continue to get wealthier, there's always someone foolish enough to buy into all the marketing hype.
The marketing hype hardly concerns active configuration, and if price is the real marker here then the Jubilee's are dirt cheap at $50k/pair in comparison to the bonkers high-end arena of mostly passively configured speakers, just by looking at the sheer physical breadth and even considering the additional amps needed with the Jubilee's.
If you want to take a shot at marketing hype, do so with named bonkers priced high-end speakers (and the amps needed to drive them) costing hundreds of thousands of $$ and their claimed innovations left and right. Klipsch on the other hand sticks to well-known horn design approaches for decades now, claims no other and at much lower prices, and you want to shoot them down for marketing hype and for catering to the wealthy just because they're offering active config.?
Obviously I'm not defending their latest Klipsch iterations if the Jubilee's are anything to go by (likely their choice of DSP unit, most of all), but things have to be put into perspective a bit.
Klipsch has really changed since PWK passed.
Yes indeed, and I'm not applauding that (let's keep active config. out of the equation for the sake of this very subject). From my chair they're making a mistake with their patented "horn-loading of a ported woofer"-approach in the effort to gain extension, as it seems to rob the bass to the lower mids of their distinctive qualities (sans the resonant mode just above 100Hz) as a real, albeit too small bass horn with its snap and very clean, layered imprinting. Moreover the new and fairly shallow Tractrix midrange horn profile arguably makes them more "hifi" sounding, but again some are missing the horn qua horn sound of the deeper, exponential profile, which in Klipsch's execution was anything but ideal.
