My new drivers are really breaking in nicely.
I've only had power to them for just over two weeks, but they are sounding great even with just a whisper worth of volume.
I have been powering them with my old McIntosh to force some movement out of them when I am home alone and can really crank them up.
I will eventually add a subwoofer system to the mix, but for now, I am just enjoying the amazing clarity. These will replace my Visatons for full range.
Not sure if my custom built JBLs will do the lows or if the pre-Klipsch Jamos will be called to duty. I'm not going with a boxed sub system, all open baffle. You can never go back to boxes once you have experienced a really good Open Baffle system.
Two things:
I have yet to own Klipsch speakers. I think I am lacking. I attended a HiFi exhibition last weekend. There was a Klipsch demo that I absolutely adored. It was mostly ridiculously hi-end stuff, all of it, with price tags bordering on the ridiculous, but the Klipsch demo was fairly affordable and had this stunningly live, punchy sound that I really want. The speakers are too large for anything I have at the moment - not objectively large, btw - but sooooo good. I wantsssssss them.
Second, re open baffle: I do not mind an open back - I would look at the back wall and make sure to dampen it. However, for cinema setups, the baffle is a wall surrounding the fronts of the speakers, all of them, L to C to R, and for a good reason. Directly in front of the speakers there's a screen, which is (mostly) why, but I believe there's loudspeaker theory for that wall in other ways, too.
For reference, this is a fairly typical cinema baffle: https://blogs.qsc.com/app/uploads/sites/5/2020/05/Baffle-Wall-v.2-550x367.jpg
Note the sub openings.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. I know that front theater speaker systems are required to fire through the projection screen with some degree of fidelity.
And yes, the screen affects the sound and the loading of the drivers.
Lots of the old Westinghouse and Altec theater systems were horn loaded in front and open baffle in the rear.
Mine are not anything like that.
I am energizing a tiny listening room, 12'x14'x9' and I do have bass traps along the wall/floor junction. I had them in the upright corners at first, like most people say to do, but they work better the way I have them now, mounted to the wall at the floor, laying sideways.
I was not diss'ing Klipsch as much as warning about what they did to the Jamo company when they bought them out.
The Jamo infinite baffle drivers I have were made in the early '90s, before Klipsch took over the factory.
They were designed to be used in various open baffle or open back installations.
I have started an "H" baffle for them to operate at a 90 degree angle from my Full range drivers, thus further eliminating room modes, nodes and nulls, by way of dual bi-cardiod dipole propagation patterns separated by 90 degrees.
I had this before using an "L" shaped open baffle and it really worked well. My goal is to get these "H" baffles up and introduce a third 90 degree angle of propagation of the bi-cardiod dipole pattern.
Not quite inverse Blumlein, yet but with speakers, it's close.
It was amazing how the low bass evened out with just two plane patterns propagating at 90 degrees apart. That is why I am building an "H" baffle, so I can set them at 90 degrees and push another plane into the room, further complicating the room mode, node and null situation and hopefully smoothing it out even further.
