Cornwascala

Years ago I had bought Athena Audition series speakers, and they had served me well. I had noticed that something was sounding “off” about them. Something wasn’t right. So I went Googling.

I didn’t find any immediate solutions to any Athena-specific problems, but kept running across information about dying capacitors in the crossovers. They were 20ish years old, so it made sense to me that maybe old capacitors were causing problems.

Turns out that some of the electrolytics were actually out of spec. Some even enough out of spec to cause audible problems, I think. Of course I had to go and research what would be the “best” caps to replace them.

Tried a couple different ones. Spent too much money. Replaced the internal wiring. All the things. Found one dead tweeter in the mix of all the speakers. Replaced it.

Messing around with the Athenas made my brain remember there were some old speakers of some sort collecting dust. Dug them out and dedusted them. Fisher DS-810s. I don’t think they were much to write home about when they were new.

Well, they weren’t new. There was a crack in the particle board on the top of one - only held on by the original wood-grain vinyl. The surrounds of the mids and tweeters were totally shot. So, I thought the most logical thing to do would be to throw new drivers in them.

Queue the overly dramatic montage of almost-but-not-quite random driver purchases, thought-out-but-wrong pre-made crossover purchases, way way way too many crossover components (because who actually needs to do measurements to design a crossover?), measurement mic purchases, a speaker measuring course purchase, and various hole saws, and at least two vinyl wraps.

Pretending to know what you are doing when you are “fixing up” your ancient speakers still leads you down the rabbit hole of the internet audio world. Did you know there are full-on speaker building kits you can buy?

A pair of CSS Criton 1TD-Xs and a pair of their accompanying bass modules (and a veneer job I do not want to talk about) later and …

Long before the Athena rebuild, I had run across something about a “Cornscala”. Some hybridization of some sort of Klipsch speakers. The name stuck with me but I wasn’t interested. I hadn’t wanted to spend that much money. I hadn’t wanted to assemble cabinets. I hadn’t wanted to do woodworking and do finicky driver cutouts that I would never get exactly right. Etc. Ad nauseam.

As you do when your are running around the internet audio world, you keep running into Klipsch speakers. And videos of them on YouTube. And reviews. And thoughts. And the occasional crazy recapper wanting to sell you something. And … they slowly work their way into your subconscious.

I thought about buying a set of La Scalas after some midnight internet search-fest. Well. No. Not at those prices. And besides, they’d be all new and shiny and there’d be no reason to tinker with them. Certainly I was unable to think about making any of the required angled cuts if I wanted to build my own.

Thought about Cornwalls. Better bass than the La Scalas and what my brain thinks of when I think of a speaker: big rectangular box. Not as expensive as the La Scalas, but you’d still have that problem of not wanting to tinker with a brand spanking new set of speakers.

Found a Facebook Marketplace listing for a set of Cornwalls. They were at a thrift store a bit of a drive away. The sold. Not to me. While I was driving to look at them.

Cornwalls are just a big box I thought. Simple easy cuts I thought. I’d be willing to try that, I thought. There have to be actual plans somewhere on the internet. I thought.

There’s a fabulous thread in a forum where Klipsch enthusiasts had essentially crowdsourced measurements and configurations of Cornwalls through the years. They had put together some technical drawings.

My brain is weird.

It has to pick apart every single little teeny tiny bit of such a thing as a technical drawing and try to reconcile them all so that it “makes sense” to me. I didn’t know CAD. I had a hard time picturing molecules in 3d during organic chemistry. My brain was in no way making sense of the drawings.

More Googling. More forums. Pictures. Internet Archive. Crites. Dean. Al. Dave. All the things and people that I’ve forgotten. The first world problem of too much information.

Then I realized I should be able to throw some of this information into AI to help me and my brain. That was immensely helpful. It also resulted in some basic CAD knowledge, and a lot of tweaking of my understanding of how any of this stuff was actually supposed to Fit Together.

I finally had a handle on it and could pull off the build…

…so while I’m waiting for my flatpacks to be cut and shipped to me, I decided to attempt to pull together the stuff that now made sense to me into something that might maybe make sense to someone else.

Which leads me to this site. With some AI design consultation and the generation of that fabulous art deco-y representation of a horn as a logo, here we are.

These pages are based nearly entirely upon the work of others and I mean no disrespect to any of them. If there’s something not right here: my fault. All my fault.