Klipsch Cornwall III
 

I found a single Cornwall I on CL for cheap, so that I might audition it. It has a great reputation. Brought it home and instantly fell madly in love. I had to either find another one or a pair.

Yesterday I brought home a minty pair of Cornwall III, three years old, finished in walnut. I'm pretty happy. They are currently powered by a Dynaco ST-70 power amp (35 WPC using EL34 power tubes). For scale, the woofers are 15".

All this is really in preparation for a build I am planning to make a DHT preamp using the 300B tube, and a "single-ended triode" power amp also using the 300B tube. SET amps are said to be breathtaking in their sound. Some of you will know that SET amps are typically flea-watt amps. The one I will build makes 8-9 WPC. Cornwalls are HIGHLY efficient and will be plenty loud with this amp. Cornwall sensitivity is 102db. This means that with 1 Watt of power, they are about as loud as standing next to a lawn mower. This is a pair of them, which means 1 Watt will be as loud as standing next to two lawn mowers.

One final message for the stereophiles here: I made a HUGE improvement in my system a few months ago by doing something very simple. I removed the preamp from the signal path. Granted, this was a tube preamp with components like capacitors certainly WAY out of spec, and getting rid of the preamp means I have essentially no tone controls. But the improvement in sound fidelity was striking. Right now, I have my sources going to a Schiit SYS, which is a just a volume pot and a switch allowing selection between two sources. The SYS is directly connected to the Dynaco.



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Do you need the preamp for phono?

Yes. I have a simple phono preamp just a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. With the Cornwalls and the upcoming 300B preamp and amp builds, I am thinking my system will be complete and need nothing. But I am probably fooling myself a little. I could use a better phono pre, optic converter and DAC. But right now, I am letting the glorious sound of these Cornwalls wash over me. I never expected horns to sound this good.

Sounds pretty amazing! I have a set of klipsch kg4s which I have grown to really like over the speakers I bought new (vandersteen).

Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t like speakers as much as I do :)

You are contradicting yourself, in one line you are saying to go to a passive preamp but you are building a tube preamp, just saying, LOL. If you are building a pre I suggest eliminating any tone controls, really not required, and usually not available on high end preamps.

Speaker placement and the room itself will make lots of difference.

Ha! KG4 is a fine speaker. Interesting that it would beat a Vandersteen, but certainly plausible.

The pre will not have tone controls. It is for switching, gain-matching and impedance-matching. The amp and preamp will be relatively simple devices actually, with few components in the signal path. There is this duality, in hifi approaches. Amps with lots of circuitry and feedback with gobs of power feeding low-efficiency speakers with lots of circuitry of their own - vs - amps with minimal circuitry feeding high sensitivity speakers. This will be my first foray into SET. According to legend, the sound is scary-transparent.

I felt like the Vandersteen were kind of delicate? The klipsch seem to play with a little more oomph.

I have a small digital system consisting of a Linn Classik cd player. I really want to try the vandersteens with that set up.

The worm hole is deep in this one..........



great speaker choice!

Yes, Rusty. Slippery slope. But I just think that notwithstanding their cost, I'll probably stop wanting a better speaker. I have a hard time imagining a better speaker.

An one of the things, Ayles, that I wanted to accomplish is sufficient air movement. There are speakers that sound amazing with 6" and 8" woofers, but they are just NOT going to move enough air to sound good with sufficient "presence." This, I would guess, is the difference between the Vandersteens and the KG4s. The KG4s have an abundance of speaker cone paper.

I too have a home built 4xEL34 amplifier which only has one potentiometer. Keeping it simple. (It does have four ECC81 for driving EL34's though)

ECC81 is a fine tube. The drivers in mine are 6GH8A.

Wow. There is quite a range of quality in recordings. Some are great. Others are crappy. These speakers are revealing.

I’m pretty dim when it comes to hi-fi literacy but this has definitely been my experience too.

give this a rip through your K-horns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJPmZFUDoi8

Dynaco. Had one my room mate built and I eventually bought, used a while and sold to my brother. It was assembled ca 1971 and is still kicking.
Great kits.