Klamath 2way Speaker - 12" Woofer

The return of the ampsandsound horn-loaded speakers recalls us back to our roots. For more than 18 years, Justin of ampsandsound has been designing, refining, and building horn-loaded speaker systems. This started with absolutely huge designs and external horns. In time, he came to adopt the belief that the best approach was the smallest cabinet possible combined with the biggest horns.

The Klamath is the gateway drug—horn speakers digging deep and extending high, providing the air and spatial cues we seek. Like JBL monitors and Klipsch speakers of yesteryear, which began more balanced and with greater extension, the Klamath’s 2-way design combines tone and intimacy; aided by its large-format 14” elliptical horn and 12” woofer, scale and deep bass notes float with ease.

The Klamath is a partially horn-loaded 2-way loudspeaker system, utilizing a direct-radiating 12” woofer for low frequencies and modern high-efficiency compression drivers matched to a state-of-the-art horn, which covers from 550 Hz to 18 kHz with ease. The combination of big horn and small-form loudspeakers offers the bass response, efficiency, dynamic capabilities, low distortion, and scale of much larger designs in a much smaller enclosure.

The Klamath is a design study in simplicity, but pairs ultra-wide-bandwidth drivers, big horns, and smallish enclosures. Marrying the virtues of direct-radiating bass with the largest horns possible yields a small-package speaker with the dynamics you would expect from a full-scale, large-format 3-way. The ported cabinet design allows for significant bass extension. Front porting was chosen to allow the Klamath to be placed against walls without compromising extension or output. The 1.4” HF driver combines the ability to cross over low at 550 Hz while extending to 18 kHz without modulating the crossover.

Its compact size makes it easier to install in most rooms and minimizes room interactions. Though bigger than a modern bookshelf speaker, the Klamath is significantly smaller than any traditional horn-loaded design and able to use commercial-grade drivers.

The Klamath offers the greatest tonal balance. Ported bass cabinets and big horns offer scale, tonal accuracy, and rich detail in a design that will appeal to audiophiles who desire all of the positive attributes of horn-loaded designs without the issues of size and room interaction inherent to many such systems.

The loudspeaker features a sophisticated, hand-wired crossover network that utilizes high-order filters and large air-core inductors for low signal loss. If the heart of the Klamath is its horns and midrange, the crossover represents its cerebral cortex. ampsandsound spent countless hours on the crossover to create a state-of-the-art design that minimizes frequency overlap and achieves phase coherence and perfect time alignment. Our crossovers are hand-made and built to the same rigorous standards as our amplifiers and loudspeakers, utilizing Hyper-litz inductors and low-Q capacitors.

Through countless iterations, one singular virtue of our crossovers has become clear: their ability to be adjustable makes system matching not just possible but an expectation.

The heart of the Klamath is its large Tractrix midrange horn with significant secondary damping. The large horn is inert due to the extraordinary steps taken to dampen it. The elliptical Tractrix horn provides controlled horizontal dispersion while limiting vertical dispersion to reduce room interactions. The midrange horn is mated to a 1.4″ large-format midrange compression driver with a 3″ voice coil. The combination of a large precision horn with a large throat and a large midrange compression driver has resulted in a midrange that is tonally accurate, yet rich with detail. The midrange is smooth, fast-sounding, and easy to listen to for hours.

Specs:

Cabinet: 16W" X 18D" 28H"

Weight: 70lbs/per cabinet

Quoted Frequency Response: 32Hz – 18Khz -3db, 94db

Sensitivity: 94db 1W/1m, 150 watts/maximum power handling