Hey, I'm Famous!!! [Archive] - Lansing Heritage Forums

Don McRitchie

01-30-2005, 02:00 PM

My definition of "Kabuki Speaker" (http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?p=113874) that I gave on the AK forum has been lifted as an entry into the Web's "Urban Dictionary" here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kabuki+Speaker

Now, if I can only get it into the Oxford English Dictionary, I'll be immortal.

Don C

01-30-2005, 02:41 PM

Congratulations! There was always a need for a term to describe those speakers, and you supplied it. It was inevitable that it would be picked up by others and used forever.

Wardsweb

01-30-2005, 04:21 PM

Wow and to think I knew you when you were just another audio enthusiast.

Mr. Widget

01-30-2005, 06:00 PM

The Pioneer CS-99A would be one of those... they still go for more than they should, dented dust caps and all. I do have an unnatural fascination with them though. Here is a pair from a recent e-Bay auction.

Widget

Don McRitchie

01-30-2005, 07:21 PM

Below is a veritable Kabirama. I put this collage together for a thread on AK calked "What Gear do You Hate". The centre picture illustrates the Pioneer CS-901 which was the system to which I first applied the term "Kabuki Speaker". As I said at the time, "This abomination wasn't engineered - it was speced out by the marketing department. It's just a mindless copy of every speaker cliche they could think of."

The coaxial driver is priceless. It has the tweeter aimed at your ankles (the first ankle biter speaker http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/images/smilies/smile.gif ). More importantly, its design defeats the entire purpose of using a coaxial driver. Coaxials tend to be expensive to manufacture, but the cost is offset with the benefit of superior imaging from having all drivers acting as a single point source. This is completely defeated when you add a discrete midrange horn and phyiscally separate it from the bass/HF drivers.

If you look carefully, you'll see that the multicell is not even an actual horn/driver. It's a small aluminum tweeter cone over which they have plunked a plastic multicell. The tweeter is just glued to the pole piece as evidenced by the fact that they had to run the tweeter leads through the bass cone to reach the driver.

Below is link to an article that explains the "engineering" behind such systems.

http://decware.com/paper10.htm

LE15-Thumper

01-30-2005, 09:33 PM

duaneage

02-05-2005, 08:23 PM

My God , Don you have awakened bad memories.

Being a GI in the 80's , most of my barracks mates had these horrible speakers, most notable were the marantz uglies on the lower right my own roomate tortured me with. Some even had LED power meters on them. One day a poor guy asked me to fix one for him, had a popped capacitor that opened up the midrange circuit. Discovered that not only were the SUPERTWEETERS not even connected, but the magnet on the woofer was smaller than the one used in my control1 monitor. The absolute worse had to be the time aligned junque Technics sold with the disk tweeters and midranges. Ugh!

aicpjim

11-01-2010, 06:20 AM

I'm so glad I got educated on these! I saw an ad on craigslist for a pair of Sansui SP-X 9700 speakers for $50, and I talked him down to $40, thinking I would have a wonderful pair of vintage speakers. After all, I had noticed that the last pair of these had sold on eBay for $465! So I thought - what the heck? I'll take a chance on $40...

They were in excellent condition, so I hooked them up to a vintage HK receiver of mine, and...... well - let's just say I was underwhelmed.... Kabuki music is a perfect description. The little 2-way bookshelf speakers I normally use, with the 5 inch drivers, sounded better.

So I said - time to put 'em on ebay and make a buck out of these! Mine didn't reach $465 for some reason, though they were in the same or better condition. However, they did reach $203, so I made a tidy profit on them. Broke even on shipping...

jcrobso

11-01-2010, 08:59 AM

He knew they didn't sound the best but he like the look of them.:blink:
I replaced all the speakers with a 3 way Beyma system and they sounded sooo much better.;)

Ducatista47

11-01-2010, 10:04 PM

From that Decware paper:

Inspect the speakers... see any plastic?.... walk away.
So walk away from a lot of Harman/JBL offerings of recent years. How the mighty have fallen.

Don't the LSR series of monitors and the EOS waveguides have plastic elements?

allen mueller

11-05-2010, 02:12 AM

There is no plastic on my LSR 6332's. The midrange and tweeter are mounted to a cast aluminum panel that is thick with ribs.

AL

moparfan

11-06-2010, 09:28 AM

It was carbon fiber on the LSR32 and LSR28, then they changed it to ABS or some kind of bulk molding compound for the 63 series? I believe they said they did it for production purposes as the carbon fiber was too difficult to work with.

gferrell

05-03-2012, 05:35 PM

SEAWOLF97

05-05-2012, 03:37 PM

these may qual for the prized "Kabuki" designation ?

saw a pair today in GW ....real beauties ..:o:

I'm gonna let you guess the famous manufacturer

SEAWOLF97

05-24-2012, 10:17 AM

these may qual for the prized "Kabuki" designation ?

saw a pair today in GW ....real beauties ..:o:

I'm gonna let you guess the famous manufacturer

HINT: from a Harman company

more 'bukies ??

louped garouv

05-24-2012, 12:50 PM

these may qual for the prized "Kabuki" designation ?

saw a pair today in GW ....real beauties ..:o:

I'm gonna let you guess the famous manufacturer

dbx?

SEAWOLF97

05-24-2012, 02:31 PM

dbx?

good guess, but no ....those are Harman Kardon .(but I've flushed the mod num from memory).

something with a 250 in it.

vinoman

11-07-2012, 03:42 PM

I realize I am a bit late to this one, and also now that this is an all Altec site, but in defense of my Pioneer CS-901A speakers that I routinely use and love, I was going to make a comment about their Kabuki nature. I was told the center woofer with the coax tweeter was copied from Altec. That seems likely.
I got my 2 pair of these speakers with a nice quad setup (Pioneer QX-949, turntable, reel to reel, etc) from an auction years ago. I knew nothing about it and jumped in head first. I discovered that the woofers made no bass and did not move. I took one to a vintage stereo guy in Tulsa, OK and he said they were worth repairing. I didn't know this was possible. So he removed the coax speaker and 15" cones. Disassembled and freed up the magnets and reassembled. Worked great.
One incorrect comment I saw earlier was that these had small magnets. Not mine, at least. Quite massive magnets on these 15" speakers. I have seen much smaller on other ones of this size. They produce the bass. I sit 11 feet back from them and the spatial thing with the coax does not bother me. Used in a home theater/music set up.
One other interesting thing I discovered was that when I tried to drive these with a new (2002) JVC unit that had "100" watts per channel, etc. Nice unit. They produced almost no bass, even with bass set at max. But when I connect these same speakers up to my vintage 1973 Pioneer QX-949 with a loudness button and bass control turned up, they rock the house down with ease. I have long pondered why my new unit cannot drive these 15" woofers. I think the answer is either capacitor sizes in the amps output stage or just more db gain in the bass circuits.
I am no expert on vintage speakers, just a happy user. I don't own, nor have used many other brands. Just my 2 cents to add.

HCSGuy

11-10-2013, 10:36 PM

I was at Costco this afternoon, and saw these. Gotta love a name like "Giga Sound System". Yes, there are lights in, I think, all the drivers, different colors, that blink to the beat. Also has peak power of 2,560 watts - that's right, not just 2,500, but 2,560! Sadly, my wife turned me down:(

DavidF

11-11-2013, 12:04 PM

Mr. Widget

11-11-2013, 01:12 PM

Not really Kabuki, but certainly in amazingly poor taste! Even more amazing is the price tag. Who would pay $1300 for such a visual assault?

Widget

gferrell

11-11-2013, 07:15 PM

But how do they sound? hopefully not the way they look!

fpitas

11-12-2013, 05:47 AM

Not really Kabuki, but certainly in amazingly poor taste! Even more amazing is the price tag. Who would pay $1300 for such a visual assault?

Widget

12 year olds with a lot of disposable income.

hjames

11-12-2013, 05:57 AM

12 year olds with a lot of disposable income.

Adults with the audio knowledge of a 12 year old!

Shiney, and with lots of blinken lights!

Here we go back to The Marching Morons (C.M. Kornbluth) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons) again ...

Greg86z28

11-12-2013, 08:33 AM

I knew I should have passed on my L250s. For the essentially the same price I could have had those.

spkrman57

11-12-2013, 09:43 AM

They are "mirror-imaged"!

At least one part right on these.

I hope they don't sound as ugly as they look!

Ron

4313B

11-12-2013, 10:12 AM

I think they go perfectly with her hair...

gferrell

11-12-2013, 07:06 PM

Hey, don't be dissing my girlfriend! Although a remarkable resemblance.

tomt

11-13-2013, 02:34 PM

I was at Costco this afternoon, and ...

way out of my league.

i'd have to settle for these -

http://i.imgur.com/dM4F0UG.png

http://www.philips.co.uk/c/audio-system/300-w-fwp3200d_05/prd/;jsessionid=783F078619275818EC03680D31512EA9.app10 1-drp3

Don C

11-17-2013, 09:40 PM

http://f.e.jbl.com/i/31/2093778016/jbl-pulse-image1.jpg

joe

11-20-2013, 09:04 PM

I've heard some of those old "marketing" speakers . They were messed up for sure BUT where would you buy something better today ? In the 70's and 80's there were hifi stores that had kabukis and good speakers too , now there is NOTHING . there is only target ,kmart and wal-mart and they have NOTHING . No matter what you are willing to pay they have only plastic landfill material that would make the oft maligned L100 century seem DAZZLING , MESMERIZING EVEN !

If I travel 2 hrs away there is a shop which has 1 pair of older jbl's , not the lsr's but the ones right before them . They also have some EONS that's about it . on the other end of that town there is (WAS ?) a guy with a rented basement in an old store that had some $40,000 + tannoys , I believe , which I honestly didn't like as much as my own jbl "project" speakers .4628b meets en5 basically , but they've evolved over time .

Let me tell you this dude was playing some vinyl for us thru some small rega??? speakers to show us that they could really rock for their size he cued jeff beck thelonious monk , which made me grin as soon as I heard the first notes and recognized the tune . I couldn't help myself , I said I have some JBL speakers that will absolutely kill on this tune . pissed him off . I did tell him that they sounded good for their size and better than anything you can get at wal-mart but my diplomacy can only stretch so far ...

most (probably all ?) of those weirdo speakers pictured in this post would seriously outperform those regas which some loafer and chino wearing snooty dude thought were the real deal . He was the owner of a hifi store and knew that his regas were better than my jbl's without even knowing what jbl's I had ....

I have to watch ebay and post in the classifieds here to try and get anything good. thats all I'm sayin' !