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Klipsch LaScala Cabs, Altec Drivers

dgwojo

dgwojo

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
Well, my theatre speaker project has now moved to a banquet hall where a sound system was needed for dance lessons, football games, and parties. The room is 1600 square feet with 13 foot ceilings, hardwood floor, bare brick from a couple centuries ago, it's amazingly dead for all the hard surfaces. A friend had some unused home brew Lascala's, I had some spare drivers, and we decided to assemble these on-site since they'd be weighty when complete, and three flights of stairs would be no fun!! I loaded these with 16" Altec woofers, 802/811B horns and 18db, 800hz crossovers. I have to say these things sound amazing with an Allied 395 receiver I had lying around, the SPL police have already warned us twice in one day!! Now I just need Craig of NOSValves to bring some tube amps and an SACD player for some real testing!! Enjoy the pics, Dave. :yes:
 

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Very cool Dave! Yes, SACD and tubes would really be the **** with those.

What Altec woofers did you use?
 
Billfort said:
Very cool Dave! Yes, SACD and tubes would really be the **** with those.

What Altec woofers did you use?
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Bill, The woofers are 500 watt, 99db, Altec 3156's from around 1984, they max at around 121db, cloth surrounds, fairly tight compliance, they seem to blend well with the 800hz horn, and they move your pants if you stand between the speakers. :yes:
 
Hey Dave, looks like a tough room to bring great sound into.
Whats the stuff on the ceiling?
I think the only way that room will truely sound great is if it has a bunch of bodies in it.

The speakers look great and I would love to hear the reports when or if you get the NOS valves.

Just a thought on this but I would try the speakers up off the hard floor about a foot or so and see if it makes much difference. You might be surprised!

We had a tavern here that was very similar with the hard dance floor and big CV speakers. The difference when the speakers were raised was stunning.

Nice Project and thanks for sharing it with us.
Gary
 
Hi Gary,
The ceiling has cloth tacked up on it, this building is from the 1800's so maybe the wood slat ceiling is a little rough so the cloth decorates and deadens the echoes, the bar below has a tin ceiling. I'll try raising them up for a sound check, we'll have to add grills as the owner said people will fill the woofer area up with food!! I was hoping to host a monthly AK get together here at some point and see if Craig would be so kind as to bring his tube amps for all of us to appreciate, then have Billfort bring his SET's, Customs would love to see that stuff crossing boarders!

No we didn't get car jacked, we stayed on old farm back roads, Dave. :yes:
 
i think the La Scala cabinets need the floor coupling to reinforce the bass of the horns. If you raise them a couple of feet from the floor you'd probably greatly reduce the bass (but I could be wrong).

If you find raising them improves the sound alot, it might be worth building fairly large footprint risers for them, to give some floor coupling as well as bringing the drivers closer to ear level.

I was going to ask if you have sufficient gaskets on the Altecs for the cones to move without smacking the cabinet surrounding the slot load. I had to glue extra 15" gaskets on some replacement woofers that I used in LaScala cabinets. The cones had suffered some damage before I performed this little modification.

Just my 2 cents
 
Beautiful job on the Altec horn. Looks very nicely integrated. Woodgrain cabinets look so much better than the standard black La Scala formats I've had.

2 more cents.
 
dgwojo said:
I was hoping to host a monthly AK get together here at some point and see if Craig would be so kind as to bring his tube amps for all of us to appreciate, then have Billfort bring his SET's, Customs would love to see that stuff crossing boarders!
Click to expand...
Hmmm....

I was thinking of doing the Customs pre-approval thing on the amps and might bring them down to AKfest if there is a system there they'll work in. Maybe what you mentioned would be fun, it's a pretty big room so the real low power stuff probably won't work but...trying 45, 2A3 and 300B SET amps along with some good push-pull in the same system/listening session might be very interesting.

Now if you could only line up some vinyl and SACD :) .
 
Just curious... on a side note...

Where did your friend come up with the plans for the cabinets?

Did he follow some already on line, or just "fly by the seat of his pants"? :D

Scott
 
lab said:
I was going to ask if you have sufficient gaskets on the Altecs for the cones to move without smacking the cabinet surrounding the slot load. I had to glue extra 15" gaskets on some replacement woofers that I used in LaScala cabinets. The cones had suffered some damage before I performed this little modification.

Just my 2 cents
Click to expand...
Hi, The Altec 16" woofers are meant for mounting from front or back, they have a very thick gasket on the front for rear mounting, they'd probably jump the voice coil gap if they ever reached the cabinet!! Thanks for the heads-up on this though, Dave. :yes:
 
SPL db said:
Just curious... on a side note...

Where did your friend come up with the plans for the cabinets?

Did he follow some already on line, or just "fly by the seat of his pants"? :D

Scott
Click to expand...
Scott, my friend made dozens of these to exact specs in the 1970's, he said he no longer has the plans, they look very much like the ones on the site below for $4100/pair. We might have one more pair available in the near future, this other pair has been in use for 30+ years, again, home-brew, the banquet hall does want one more pair so I'm hoping we can get these, then we can see how the EV drivers sound vs the Altecs. Dave. :yes:

Klipsch
 
Those are the perfect application for La Scalas and their ilk. I'm sure they can hit some crazy SPL's with the Altec drivers in them.

I think the draped fabric ceiling and the rough brick walls will keep the room from being as reverberant as it might seem. Keeping tables with tablecloths in the room, and of course, putting a bunch of people in there will help deaden it up a bit, too.

It's true that raising the speakers up will decouple them from the floor, but since you've got them in the corners, the front wall and side wall reinforcement should keep the bass fairly healthy. I personally would raise them up, or tilt them back maybe 10-15 degrees. But you should experiment! That's the fun part, right?

I've got a road case full of older Cetec Gauss pro sound drivers sitting around here; after looking at DIY projects like this , maybe I'll put together some crazy horns.
 
Speaking of pants.

Mine are moving for entirely different reasons looking at your pictures of those speakers. :D
 
Hi again Dave. Just to let you know that my thought on raising the speakers off the floor a bit was based purely on personal experience with a very similar room but completely different speakers.
I don't know the first thing about "DECOUPELING" as mentioned a couple of times above. Could be lascala's are ment to be on the floor!

I just know from the situation I was involved with and numerous times messing around at home that every speaker needs the sweetest spot placment to sound it's best. I also know just from your pics that the room you have could be a tough one to adjust sound in. I would expect the room to be rather harsh when empty because there appears to be nothing to absorb the waves.
The ceiling treatment is a great start but don't stop there. I am also aware you have to deal to a great degree with what you have to work with. Padded carpet on the floor might work great for the music but would not work for dancing and the other uses the room has.
Sometimes the simplest change makes an amazing difference. Moving the speakers away from the corners, tilting them a bit, raising them should all be tried while attempting to tune it to the best possible sound.
Too often we get stuck in this mode that says "THE SPEAKERS GO HERE" and never give them a chance to be the best that they can be.
I am sure you will figure it out because now that the work of getting the system set up and in place is done, the fun of getting them just right begins and it is always the best part of the process.
Enjoy Buddy. It looks great!
Gary
 
One thing to keep in mind here though Gary is that these are true horn loaded woofers and there is no cheating physics - bass horns MUST be big - very big - to play low unless using adjacent surface coupling.

A corner horn (or corner placement) essentially lets you get away with a horn mouth 1/8 the size of the real thing, floor/wall placement 1/4 size and floor placement 1/2 size. Putting a horn woofer out in the room and up on a stand means you need a full size mouth for the target cut-off - absolutely huge for any kind of bass. 'Out and up' works great for mids and highs but definitely not for horn bass.

The best fullrange horn systems I've heard used combinations of locations and surface reinforcement techniques. Midrange and treble horns out in the room and up at ear height, midbass horns (say >80Hz) out in room but floor mounted for 1/4 or 1/2 space loading and bass horns in the corners to take advantage of 1/8 space loading. Obviously, this is a huge system with multiple cabinets but my point is that horn bass needs surface coupling and in a single cabinet speaker, compromise is the only answer.

Any time I had heard LaScalas in the past I was struck by the nice upper bass that mated nicely with the horn mids but lack of lower bass and this was more of a problem the further the speakers got from room boundaries. What really intrigues me about Dave's speakers here though is the use of 1 (Altec!) horn driver from the mids on up mating with a true horn below. Aside from deep bass (which floor or even corner placement would certainly help), I bet this is one sweet sounding speaker.
 
Billfort said:
Any time I had heard LaScalas in the past I was struck by the nice upper bass that mated nicely with the horn mids but lack of lower bass and this was more of a problem the further the speakers got from room boundaries. What really intrigues me about Dave's speakers here though is the use of 1 (Altec!) horn driver from the mids on up mating with a true horn below. Aside from deep bass (which floor or even corner placement would certainly help), I bet this is one sweet sounding speaker.
Click to expand...
Bill, here's the story behind the use of a single horn, my friend and co-worker has two brothers, all three men were making these cabinets here in Ann Arbor, MI back in the 1970's, each kept a pair for themselves, and sold the others. This pair was in a basement for decades, all the holes were cut for the EV drivers as can be seen in the attached picture of how these looked when found (please ignore the garbage cans, that's where these were headed if I didn't intercept, lol!!). Not only did my friend get the cabinets, but also the T35 EV tweeters, crossovers, and 1823M/8HD mids, all unused NOS, still in the box. I told him not to open them as they'll be worth a small fortune on ePay, so, I loaned him a spare Altec 811B horn and he said a little time spent with my Rotozip and he could jimmy the Altec horn in. So, $$$$ drove the decision to keep the EV's in the box, enlarge the hole, and install the Altec's. The weird thing here is the original woofers that are still in the box, they're made by a company in Chicago, a name like Wilding or something similar to that?? Dave. :yes:
 

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Turn the EV's into dollars and use 802/811's - gotta love that, talk about a win-win!

Sure hope to hear these some day Dave (with tubes :) ), nice job.
 
Billfort said:
Turn the EV's into dollars and use 802/811's - gotta love that, talk about a win-win!

Sure hope to hear these some day Dave (with tubes :) ), nice job.
Click to expand...
Bill,
You'll love this too, an Altec 416-8A was used as a template for the woofer holes, I still have it here, the cone spider and surround needs retraining from being stored pushed-in on a pillow for decades, believe it or, it doesn't rub and works fine!! I'm dying to try the new Great Plains Audio GPA-515-8D woofers in these, Bill H. and I discussed these legendary woofers back in April, they're now available, a ferrite magnet 515 with the response curve and sound of the infamous alnico 515B, I want them so bad!! I just got a load of 802's back from Bill, he recharged all the alnico's, and installed new 902 phragms in a pair of 802 drivers for me to use on this Lascala project. Bill's amazing, he turned over 8 drivers in less than 24 hours!! BTW, the new 416 woofers are also available now at a very reasonable price, Dave. :yes:
 
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