Klipschorn

The Klipschorn is a large wooden loudspeaker built to stand in the corner of a room. It is about 130 centimetres tall, and its back is a wedge that fits into the angle where two walls meet. A tall lower cabinet holds a 15-inch woofer inside a folded horn; above it a shallower cabinet, behind a long cloth grille, holds the horns for midrange and treble. From the front it reads as a plain, veneered cupboard. Every driver in it is horn-loaded, which makes it unusually efficient: a single watt is enough for loud listening.

Its designer, Paul W. Klipsch, was an engineer who had read Bell Laboratories' research on sound reproduction in the 1930s and wanted cinema sound in a living room. Stationed during the war at a munitions proving ground in Hope, Arkansas, he built his first successful folded corner woofer by hand in 1942, using the walls and floor of the corner as the end of the horn. He patented it in 1945, and in 1946 began making the speaker for sale in Hope. The name came, he said, from a New York trade contact who had already heard of his corner horn.

The first cabinets were built by the Baldwin piano company and a local joiner, and in 1948 Klipsch moved production into the proving ground's old telephone exchange. The conductor Arthur Fiedler endorsed the Klipschorn, and in the 1970s the DJ David Mancuso used it for his New York Loft parties. A tweeter was added in the early 1950s, and drivers, horns and crossovers have been replaced many times since.

The biggest change came in 2018, when the bass horn was enclosed so that the speaker no longer depends on a tight fit into the corner. The current AK7 is still a three-way, fully horn-loaded corner cabinet of the same shape and size, hand-built in Hope and sold by the company as the speaker in continuous production longer than any other.