Not everything I come up with gets shown to people nor do I even make some of everything that has been designed. That is part of the discovery process and there are times when inspiration gets ahead of common sense and you guys never get to see the wasted hours spent fiddling around with ideas. Well I guess it is not really wasted but surely is not productive either.
In any case I have had Klipsch heads after me for some time to do various things like for instance a wood horn for La Scalas and KHorns. Another one is a wood LMAHL or Large MAHL. I have held off on this because that .2″ flange that gets recessed into the motorboard (or baffle as they are known in many places. Motorboard to me because that is how they were named on the Klipsch forum by many.) cutout is plenty for the plastic and aluminum flanges. For wood however my fear was the ability of wood to split out at the corners where the bevel head screws went for mounting. I could have just had drilled holes and a flat bottomed screw but I did not like how that looked when modeled. As in one of those things no one see’s but me.
Now how you get somewhere may vary from person to person and for me sometimes odd things lead to inspiration. I have had a couple of people that wanted MAHLS with no engraving on them so I removed it and they looked pretty good and now wood MAHLS are only cut this way. So I think, what if I remove the screw holes and the engraving how would that look and what would I do for mounting?
For better or worse I did come up with something. My concern here is you can tell people not to tighten something down or they can split or ruin it. What constitutes snug enough is a wildly variable amount depending on the person. Thinking of the few stripped screw holes I have had to deal with over the years of restoring Klipsch speakers and people with screw guns.
I think I came up with a way of doing it that is not fool proof but as good as the material used will allow for. First up is a front view.
Second up is an assembly view showing how I propose to clamp the horn to the motorboard.
And the third to show it without the motorboard.
I expect to be offering these soon as yet another variant of the MAHL’s as soon as I get a speaker to try them in. I need to check for clearance with other drivers and horns and to see just how much pressure is needed to tighten these down enough to stop any cabinet rattle but not be so much that the flange is split from the lens body. I am using serrated bottom nuts for these to lock things in place.
One of the final questions I have to answer is will the DE-10 I commonly offer with the LMAHL be to heavy for this mounting method? I might just offer these with DE-120’s as they are much less weight though sadly almost double the price my cost. Looking to get some KPT-301’s soon as test beds so for those of you wanting these your time just might be soon at hand.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 