“Music Matters” at Bjorn’s: The Klipsch Demonstration

Klipsch Group: Studio 2, Bjorn’s Audio – Video, San Antonio

Click here for an overview of the “Music Matters” event at Bjorn’s: www.avguide.com/blog/1st-annual-“music-matters”-event-bjorn’s-audio-–-video-san-antonio

Klipsch Regional Sales Manager, Alan Jurgens, was demonstrating Klipsch Group’s visually stunning and sonically impressive Palladium P39F loudspeakers (the company’s flagship model), driven by a PS Audio Trio amplifier fed by a Denon DVD-3800 disk player. With all due respect to the PS Audio and Denon components, Jurgens and I agreed that the P39Fs would, in most real world applications, be driven by even higher-end components, but even so, the potential of the P39Fs was quite clear.

 The P39F features horn-loaded tweeter and midrange drivers married up to an array of three 9-inch low frequency drivers and, as you might expect, the speaker is very sensitive and can handle large (and small) scale dynamic swings with ease. Jurgens, who turns out be a blues buff, put on some wonderful electric blues recordings, which sounded quite soulful through the P39Fs. On first impression, two things stood out about the P39Fs in my mind. First, they don’t sound like stereotypical “horn speakers;” although they are very detailed, they are also extremely smooth with none of the “cupped hands” colorations some horn-type speakers tend to exhibit. Second, they have the quality (one that is something of a family trait among Klipsch speakers) of sounding dynamically alive. The experience left me wanting to hear the speakers with even higher-performance electronics and source components.