Klipsch RP-6000F and HOW we made it GREAT!

hey everybody welcome back to gr research where we are doing more eclipse upgrades yes that's right you guys just keep sending me clip speakers so here we go um i got the little uh si uh what is this the 500 m sitting up here again i shot the factory measurements of this one in a video that was posted a couple weeks ago it's one of the next ones up on the upgrade list i'm about to do something for this one so that's coming but i wanted to throw it up in this video just just to balance things out a little bit and remind you guys hey i'm not picking on these clips guys they do do some pretty nice work this one measured really well if you want to go find the video that i did on it you can look at the measurements it measured great better than any of the other models so they do do some pretty pretty decent design work so that being said clips guys what is up with the rest of these things this is the 6000 f it's the floor standing version with those six inch woofers and i know you can't see it completely in the video here i'm gonna flip it over and turn it around and you can see everything so um but i've got it standing up here so that i can at first show you guys what's inside same stuff that's in all these little clip speakers cheese cheesy stuff um there are some polyester film caps on everything there's still an iron core inductor on the woofers there is a couple of air core inductors also sand cast resistors pvc jacketed wire and yes all the connections and the screws on the back of the terminals are all just steel not brass not copper steel yes i know um so not the greatest and keep in mind still they're trying to hit price points with these things and they're trying to keep the prices really low let me lay this thing over so you can get a better look at it there you go now at least you can see the whole speaker and it's not standing up in the way so let's talk about the engineering and the design of this thing and what's going on with these speakers so let's look at some measurements i'm going to pull up for you guys stock factory measurements and and then we're going to look at what i what i wound up doing with this thing now the way they have this wired it's a two-way speaker so that means both woofers are playing together and then the tweeter what that causes is the acoustic centers to be far apart so the acoustic center is going to be midway point between the two woofers to the tweeter what that does is is it makes it causes time delays from one to the other as you move up and down vertically there's time arrival differences because those drivers are so far apart and it starts causing cancellation and when i took a measurement on this on tweeter axis which is an industry standard we measure on tweeter axis because that's pretty much your ear level and when you're seated your air level is pretty close to the tweeter let's look at the on axis response if you look at it it's got a bit of a hole there in the crossover point there's a dip and it's very common with eclipse models i've seen it across a bunch of these things it's still within plus or minus three and a half four db and true if you start moving the microphone down to the top woofer axis the time delays shift in such a manner that that dip starts to come up a little bit however they're still not in phase very well what do i mean by not in phase very well let's look at the crossover response this is individual tweeter response individual office response we've got tweeter here woofers here and the tweeter level is about a db or so louder than the woofers which again is typical of the way they voice a lot of their speakers that's why some of them are a little in your face and get a little um hard to listen to after a while twitter level's a little hot then look as they roll into each other what we want to see when they fall into each other like that is we want to see a summation of the two to where it makes a balanced response that means the drivers are in phase and also if you look at where they're crossing if if the summation is 6 db up then that's a good indication that they're in phase very well in this case if you look at the crossover response you'll see that the summation barely comes up over the individual driver's response as they're falling so they're about 80 degrees out of phase so they're not 180 degrees out of face which would make a complete cancellation which would be less than the summation of the two but they're not gaining anything either maybe just they're gaining a little bit but not much if you start moving the microphone down and in this case at the seating position that would mean putting your head on the floor then the time delay of the tweeter would be moved back in time in such a way that they would start to become in phase but that would be ridiculous and keep in mind too that the vertical off axis meaning the time arrival and the time of the phase effect of the drivers which is time arrival needs to be such that they're in phase over a wide range and that they create a more even room response if you've got an irregular off-axis response whether it be vertical or horizontal then the overall room response can be a little rough you want it balanced completely smooth so um let's look at that let's look at the horizontal off axis which drops off evenly but then again the on axis was a bit of a hole so not great the vertical off axis as we look at it on tweeter axis and we start going up four inches per measurement we see a huge suck out starting um just a just a four inch movement over tweeter axis and the hole is really deep and that's that would be the orange line if you look then at that yellow line that you see on the graph that's just moved up eight inches now we're completely out of phase that's the huge hole so you can imagine an uneven room response and then as you move up four more inches you'll notice that it's actually about the same it's starting to come back up a little bit so it's starting to come back around the other direction so still not good and if you look at the impedance response you'll see that the impedance on the tweeter end is a little bit higher than the impedance on the woofer end a little mismatch not bad spectral decay though that's the stored energy in this thing is actually pretty good i mean really good it drops off real cleanly so no driver ringing going on there so that part is okay uh cabinet-wise very lightly braced a lot of a lot of cabinet residences there so you got that to deal with plus all these parts in the signal path that's smearing the signal corrupting the signal all that is causing a problem so looking at the on-axis response after i finish the new upgrade you can see that now it's much smoother what i did was i made this into a two and a half way design we're crossing the tweeter only to the top woofer and we're using just a first order filter on the lower woofer and we're pulling it back further so that the acoustic centers is more at the top offer so we're not causing as big a difference between the time arrivals of the woofer versus the tweeter so all that is a lot more balanced if you look at the crossover responses you'll see now these are the individual driver's response in the lower line there in the blue you see the lower woofer only then you see the upper woofer and the tweeter and then the red line is the summation of the two nice and balanced tweeter is not hotter than the woofers it's going to be an easy easier to listen to speaker if we look at the horizontal off axis we see it dropping away very even in the off axis in fact the tweeter actually has a pretty smooth response if you go up to again that crossover response that we just looked at notice how smoothly that tweeter rolls off that's still with a first order filter on that tweeter and an l pad and the l-pad is just resistors that are bringing the levels down but it that's a nicely well controlled tweeter i didn't have to put a bunch of parts on it the woofer also um there's a second order filter on the woofer on this one first order on this lower woofer so it doesn't involve a lot of parts that's a bonus less than the signal path lower cost now we can use higher quality parts let's look at the vertical off axis now vertical off axis we're on tweeter axis and then we're moving up four inches notice the orange line now it it's starting to drop a little bit not much we're talking now you're moving up and down in a range and because the acoustic centers are closer together we're keeping a more even response over a wider range now note that at the yellow line that's that's now eight inches up starting to drop out a little bit but not too bad i mean the acoustic centers are still pretty far apart because of the diameter of that tweeter and then if you look at the green line you can see it's starting to drop out pretty good that's 12 inches up at one meter so that would be like putting your head at the very top of your ceiling from the listing distance which so the response vertically and horizontally now much more balanced overall and if you look at the impedance curve you'll note that the impedance on the tweeter end has been brought back down a little bit and is a little more balanced i was able to work with those resistor values and use a little more in shunt and less in inline and try to balance things out a little bit so it's a lot more balanced also spectral decay again super clean spectral decay this thing drops off super clean across the board so no issues there again parts count was pretty low and i came up with a kit for this thing the all the new parts that you're going to need all new wiring uh three sheets of no risk because you're gonna need three sheets of no rest for this thing to damp out all of this cabinet resonances uh that adds up a little bit a set of tube connectors came to 435 dollars so for 435 dollars you can take this mess and turn it into a pretty dang nice speaker that should be really nice to listen to super balanced and after the upgrade one of the better klipsch models that i've worked on so that's it for the upgrade on the klipsch rp 6000 f uh thanks for watching you guys if you haven't subscribed please do i appreciate the subscriptions hit that little bell notification button too you'll be notified when new videos pop up that's it for this episode thanks for watching

Channel: GR-Research

Views: 32,765

Rating: 4.9078946 out of 5

Keywords: Tuesday Tech Talk, audiophile, hifi, loudspeaker, fullrange driver, comb filtering, GR-Research, Danny Richie, crossover design, measurements, best loudspeakers, tube amplifier, preamplifier, diy speakers, audiophile speakers, audiophile music, amplifier, best voice, audiophiles, high end, baffle step loss, open baffle, fast bass, subwoofers, line source, drivers, low distortion, the room, speaker upgrade, audiophile loudspeakers, crossovers, DIY Audio, soundstage, klipsch, rp-6000f

Id: 8UR3ORA9xAQ

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021