Klipsch Audio Technologies /ˈklɪpʃ/ (also referred to as "Klipsch Speakers" or "Klipsch Group, Inc.") is an American loudspeaker company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Founded in Hope, Arkansas in 1946 as 'Klipsch and Associates' by Paul W. Klipsch, the company produces loudspeaker drivers and enclosures, as well as complete loudspeakers for high end, high fidelity sound systems, public address applications, and personal computers.
On January 6, 2011, Audiovox announced that the company had signed a "term sheet to purchase all the shares of Klipsch Group Inc".The sale was completed March 1, 2011
The Klipschorn, or Khorn, loudspeaker is the flagship product of Klipsch Audio Technologies. It was patented by founder Paul W. Klipsch in 1946, and has been in continuous production in the company's Hope, Arkansas, plant since then—-the longest run in speaker production history. Although the Klipschorn's basic design is more than sixty years old, it has received periodic minor modifications.
The Klipschorn's large (51” H (129 cm) x 31” W (79 cm) x 28” D (72 cm)) enclosure houses a three-way design: separate drivers—the woofer, the squawker, and the tweeter, respectively—handle the bass, midrange, and treble portions of the sound signal.
Two rectangular horn lenses coupled to compression drivers handle the midrange and treble, while a 15” cone woofer is mounted in a folded bass bin compartment below. The folds open at the rear of the horn cabinet structure, utilizing the room walls and floor as continuations of horn structure, thereby increasing the effective length and size of the horn and affording greater bass extension.
The body of the speaker cabinet forms a horn. The “Khorn” shape is like a baseball diamond: the pointy rear is open and exposed, the flat front covered with a wood panel and the top enclosed in cloth. The speaker sits in the corner of two adjoining walls, using the walls and floor boundaries as extensions of the horn. Technically speaking, the Khorn's folded bass "corner horn" can be described as a bifurcated trihedral (floor and two walls to form the trihedral corner) exponential wave transmission line.
This design results in extremely high sensitivity. One watt RMS produces a 105 decibel per meter sound pressure level (SPL), which is approximately 14–20 decibels higher than conventional speakers. Such sensitivity requires less amplifier power to achieve the same loudness. (Paul Klipsch demonstrated that the Klipschorn could reproduce concert-level dynamics powered by as little as 1 watt per channel.) The Khorn encourages the use of low powered amplifiers. The growing popularity in the audiophile community of single-ended valve (vacuum tube) amplifiers has sparked renewed interest in the Klipschorn and other highly sensitive Klipsch models.[citation needed]
Utilizing the room walls and floor boundaries as extensions of the bass horn helps extend the speaker's frequency response down into the 35 Hz range, considerably lower than would be possible otherwise. Because of the folded horn, the woofer cone moves no more than a few millimeters.
As the only speaker in the world to be in continuous production for 60 years, the Klipschorn has remained relatively unchanged since its inception. Circa 1970, diode overload protection was added across voice coils to prevent burnout from clipping produced by an overdriven amplifier. The midrange horn was originally made entirely from formed wood. Some fibreglas bells were used on the midrange horn, as well as metal, in the late 1950s. Eventually the midrange horn was changed from metal to braced fiberglass, and the tweeter was front mounted in the 1980s. Both of these changes reduced the already low distortion.[citation needed] In 2005, the company made some minor cosmetic and functional revisions to this legendary speaker, including the elimination of the inset collar, or spacer, between the upper and lower cabinets for a cleaner appearance. A horizontal wall seal was added to improve the low frequency horn's connection to the wall. The crossover, which includes some equalization, was revoiced in the early 2000s.
In 2006, Klipsch offered the 60th Anniversary Klipschorn, a separate model from the standard Klipschorn
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