There’s a good case to be made that the world’s greatest—and strangest—audiophile culture resides in Japan. Probably the most important notion the Japanese have introduced to our hobby is that home audio isn’t merely a way of heightening the musical art of others but can be an art in itself. This idea’s most flamboyant embodiment was the poet, journalist, chef, and amplifier builder Susumu Sakuma, better known as Sakuma-san.
After having built many amplifiers as a young man, Sakuma-san experienced an epiphany: Amplifiers that measured well often failed to make him feel deeply. He soon discovered that, for him, the most emotional sound came from mono systems powered by transformer-coupled amplifiers that used directly heated triode tubes.
In 1968, somewhat improbably, Sakuma-san opened a restaurant in the quaint seaside town of Tateyama. The eatery, called Concorde, was crowded with amplifiers of his design, which he demonstrated with a Garrard 401 turntable, a damped Grace tonearm, a Denon DL-102 mono cartridge, and Altec and Lowther speakers. Apparently, Concorde also served food: For years, the sole dish prepared by Sakuma-san was “hamburger steak,” which came with two sauces and cost around $10.
In the articles on hi-fi that he contributed to the Japanese magazine MJ, Sakuma-san also wrote about film, fishing, karaoke, and pachinko machines, and he usually began and ended his contributions with a poem. He considered himself an evangelist for emotional sound and demonstrated his audio systems in homes, at conferences, and on concert stages around the world. Though he passed in 2018, his fan club, called Direct Heating, remains a happening concern (footnote 1). Sakuma-san was fond of coining mottos—one was “farewell to theory”—but what has stuck with me most is his description of the ideal sound: “endless energy with sorrow.”
Living with the Klipsch La Scalas
This phrase came to mind often during the months I spent living with the Klipsch La Scala speakers, which imbued my musical life with unprecedented amounts of sound and emotion, and which I believe Sakuma-san would have enjoyed. Despite what some of the glossy ads, in this magazine and elsewhere, would have us believe, no speaker can excel at every aspect of musical reproduction. All of them, even the megabuck ziggurats, are a compromise. Yet what the La Scalas do well is so rare in today’s audio scene, and so fun, that everyone should experience it at least once. Their strengths also happen to dovetail neatly with my musical and sonic biases. It goes without saying that these biases may not be yours.
First introduced in 1963 as a public address speaker, the La Scala, now in its AL5 iteration, is the smallest of Klipsch’s fully horn-loaded models, a little sibling to the venerable Klipschorn (with which it shares its three drive units) and the newer Jubilee. Of course, it’s not even remotely small: Each speaker, made of birch plywood and MDF, measures 40″ tall, 24 ¼” wide, and 25 5/16″ deep, and weighs 201lb. (Just typing that number sent a twinge through my lower back.)
The La Scala is composed of two stacked sections. The upper cabinet contains the tweeter—a compression driver with a 1″ polyimide diaphragm mated to a Tractrix horn—and the midrange unit: a compression driver with a 2″ phenolic diaphragm mated to an exponential horn. Both horns are made of ABS plastic. The lower cabinet contains a 15″ fiber-composite-cone woofer that’s mounted backward and fires into a folded horn (which some would argue is in fact a waveguide). The rear of the upper cabinet has two sets of heavy-duty binding posts, allowing for biwiring but not biamping.
Mercifully, assembly was not nearly as odious as I expected thanks to the La Scala’s modular structure and the bass cabinet’s substantial rubber feet, which made moving the speakers surprisingly easy. Assembly does require two people, and one part—holding the upper cabinet while connecting its wire harness to the lower one—requires three, as I learned after much grunting, awkward contortion, and foul language.
Despite the La Scala’s boxy form—roughly the size and shape of a washing machine at a big-city laundromat—I found its appearance delightful. The book-matched walnut veneer on the pair I auditioned was seamlessly applied and beautifully finished, making the $13,198/pair La Scalas appear more heirloom-worthy and furniture-like than many pricier alternatives. Even the magnetic grilles, done up in a guitar-amp mesh and sporting vintage-looking logos, were conceived with enough restraint to look cool. Nothing comes off quite as pandering and corny as retro styling done wrong, and Klipsch should be commended for hiring astute designers.
The manual offers assembly illustrations and one solitary paragraph of text. Reading it, I learned that 1W of power will cause the Klipsches to emit a hair-raising 105dB, roughly the amount of noise made by a Douglas DC-8 at one nautical mile. (110dB is the average human threshold for pain.) I also spotted a diagram suggesting that the La Scalas should be placed 13’–17′ apart, a recommendation I found a bit laughable given that most of us don’t live in a Greyhound terminal or aboard Jeff Bezos’s superyacht.
In practice, the La Scalas proved to be fairly forgiving about placement, though they sounded bloated when pushed against a wall and a little bass-light when pulled more than a few feet into the room. Some internet commentators suggest toeing them in 45° and crossing them in front of the listener, but in this position they sounded pretty awful. The Klipsches ended up working best roughly in the same spot as my Altec Valencias: 8½’ apart, 2½’ from the front wall, and some 10′ from the listening seat, toed in to cross slightly behind it.
Listening
When the folks at Klipsch offered to send me a new pair of La Scalas for review, I requested that the speakers undergo several hundred hours of use before they were shipped, but this proved impossible. Straight out of the cartons, they had a plasticky, nasal sound and gummy transient response; with low-power tube amps, they refused to make much bass at all. Happily, all of this went away after about 100 hours of use. Patience is something I struggle with, and I admit that I came to some incorrect conclusions about the Klipsches before those long hours elapsed.
Oh, and about those neat-looking grilles: Music sounded more open without them, so regretfully I left them off.
The La Scalas offer a fundamentally different experience than most audiophile speakers. Their ability to (re)produce lifelike dynamic contrasts and scale is unmatched by any speaker I’ve had in my home, and matched by few speakers I’ve heard anywhere (all of which were larger). Once most speakers reach a satisfying volume, they allow a fairly limited range of additional loudness before they begin to compress, sound grainy, or distort. With the La Scalas, that range was practically limitless: I could set the volume anywhere from Mozart-trio moderate to Mastodon-concert loud with no audible penalty. In part that’s because horn loading allows not only for increased sensitivity and efficiency but also for drive units to operate at lower levels of distortion.
The Klipsches created sonic images that were eerily, entirely life-sized and placed them on a stage as large as the recording and the room allowed. Combined with their hair-raising dynamic chops, this allowed the La Scalas to come uncannily close to creating the illusion of real musicians playing in a room. That’s a big-time reviewing cliché, so perhaps a more effective way to communicate this is to say that they reveal how radically most speakers—even large ones—miniaturize the dynamics and scale of recordings.
I couldn’t get enough of this illusion. Near the middle of “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from Dusty in Memphis (LP Atlantic SD 8214), there’s a moment when the band, the string section, the background voices of the Sweet Inspirations, and Dusty Springfield all surge. Played at a satisfying volume through most speakers, this crescendo comes across as a splashy, screechy mess. The La Scalas made me aware of the extent to which I had trained my brain to fill in the missing information; through them, I heard every detail of this passage, played at a loudness comparable to what the recording engineer must have heard at Memphis’s American Sound Studio in September 1968.
The big Klipsches also allowed me to hear an array of meaningful detail with startling clarity: the reverb on Springfield’s voice, her intakes of breath before every phrase, the mahogany chunk of Reggie Young’s electric guitar, the coppery ring of Gene Chrisman’s cymbal. These musicians appeared in front of me utterly human-sized, playing and singing in physical space with realistic force. With the right amplifiers (more on this later), the La Scalas also imbued this recording with copious presence, texture, and tone color, making it as lifelike and complete as I’ve heard it. (What I heard was an illusion in more ways than one: Springfield recorded her final vocals in New York and had them overdubbed. Aren’t records great?)
If I’m making the Klipsches sound like a party speaker that excels only at playing loud, permit me to correct that impression. “Do they play opera?” Herb Reichert asked when I enthused to him about the La Scalas. That’s a fair question given that they’re named after the world’s most storied opera venue. Listening to Boris Khaikin and the Bolshoi Theater orchestra and choir’s rendition of the letter scene in Eugene Onegin (Spotify BMG Classics 74321170902), I was struck by the delicacy with which the big horns rendered this compressed mono recording from 1955, first issued on the Soviet Melodiya label. It happens to be my favorite version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, with a radiant, 20-something Galina Vishnevskaya in the role of Tatyana and Khaikin taking the score faster than is common today, imbuing it with vigor and wit missing from more lugubrious readings. This nearly 70-year-old recording also showed off the Klipsches’ buoyant way of carrying rhythmic lines, which sound as dancing or as relentless as the music dictates.
The La Scala is not without flaws, or more precisely, limitations. Surprising for a speaker of such ample proportions, it doesn’t do really deep bass; its 15″ woofer rolls off steeply at around 50Hz. Roy Delgado, Klipsch’s chief audio engineer, told me that this is a result of a compromise that allowed Paul Klipsch to design a relatively compact bass horn. (The Cornwall, a smaller and less expensive sibling in Klipsch’s Heritage line, dispenses with the bass horn and goes down to 35Hz.) Whether this deficit might be a problem for you depends on your musical diet and priorities. While I noticed bass missing on certain electronic music and hip hop recordings, I rarely missed it; some La Scala owners, though, use a subwoofer. I should add that, despite being limited, the Klipsches’ bass is in no way wimpy: When called upon, the big horns emitted bass notes as stentorian and downright scary as any speakers I’ve lived with.
Last, while the La Scalas throw an enormous and cavernous soundstage, they do not create the razor-sharp sonic holographs of the kind conjured by certain contemporary minimonitors. But if that’s crucial to you, you probably aren’t considering these speakers.
In my room, the Klipsches’ frequency response sounded just a shade richer than neutral, with an extended but mellow top end and some added presence in the lower midrange and upper bass. This euphonic voicing made poor recordings easier to listen to and good recordings propulsive and fun. I wouldn’t change it for a flatter one, but frequency-response-graph enthusiasts for whom absolute neutrality is paramount should probably look elsewhere.
Footnote 1: You can learn more about Sakuma-san and his designs on the Direct Heating website: www.big.or.jp/~dh.
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