![]() ![]() Mercifully, assembly was not nearly as odious as I expected thanks to the La Scala’s modular structure and the bass cabinet’s substantial rubber feet, which made moving the speakers surprisingly easy. The rear of the upper cabinet has two sets of heavy-duty binding posts, allowing for biwiring but not biamping. The lower cabinet contains a 15" fiber-composite-cone woofer that’s mounted backward and fires into a folded horn (which some would argue is in fact a waveguide). The upper cabinet contains the tweeter-a compression driver with a 1" polyimide diaphragm mated to a Tractrix horn-and the midrange unit: a compression driver with a 2" phenolic diaphragm mated to an exponential horn. ![]() The La Scala is composed of two stacked sections. (Just typing that number sent a twinge through my lower back.) Of course, it’s not even remotely small: Each speaker, made of birch plywood and MDF, measures 40" tall, 24¼ " wide, and 255/16 " deep, and weighs 201lb. It goes without saying that these biases may not be yours.įirst introduced in 1963 as a public address speaker, the La Scala, now in its AL5 iteration, is the smallest of Klipsch’s fully horn-loaded models, a little sibling to the venerable Klipschorn (with which it shares its three drive units) and the newer Jubilee. Their strengths also happen to dovetail neatly with my musical and sonic biases. Yet what the La Scalas do well is so rare in today’s audio scene, and so fun, that everyone should experience it at least once. All of them, even the megabuck ziggurats, are a compromise. Despite what some of the glossy ads, in this magazine and elsewhere, would have us believe, no speaker can excel at every aspect of musical reproduction. This phrase came to mind often during the months I spent living with the Klipsch La Scala speakers, which imbued my musical life with unprecedented amounts of sound and emotion, and which I believe Sakuma-san would have enjoyed. 1 Sakuma-san was fond of coining mottos-one was “farewell to theory” - but what has stuck with me most is his description of an ideal sound: “endless energy with sorrow.” Though he passed in 2018, his fan club, called Direct Heating, remains a happening concern. He considered himself an evangelist for emotional sound and demonstrated his audio systems in homes, at conferences, and on concert stages around the world. In the articles on hi-fi that he contributed to the Japanese magazine MJ, Sakuma-san also wrote about film, fishing, karaoke, and pachinko machines, and he usually began and ended his contributions with a poem. Apparently, Concorde also served food: For years, the sole dish prepared by Sakuma-san was “hamburger steak,” which came with two sauces and cost around $10. The eatery, called Concorde, was crowded with amplifiers of his design, which he demonstrated with a Garrard 401 turntable, a damped Grace tonearm, a Denon DL-102 mono cartridge, and Altec and Lowther speakers. In 1968, somewhat improbably, Sakuma-san opened a restaurant in the quaint seaside town of Tateyama. He soon discovered that, for him, the most emotional sound came from mono systems powered by transformer-coupled amplifiers that used directly heated triode tubes. This idea’s most flamboyant embodiment was the poet, journalist, chef, and amplifier builder Susumu Sakuma, better known as Sakuma-san.Īfter having built many amplifiers as a young man, Sakumasan experienced an epiphany: Amplifiers that measured well often failed to make him feel deeply. Probably the most important notion the Japanese have introduced to our hobby is that home audio isn’t merely a way of heightening the musical art of others but can be an art in itself. ![]() There’s a good case to be made that the world’s greatest-and strangest-audiophile culture resides in Japan. ![]()
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