Klipsch La Scala AL5 Loudspeaker Scala Genesis
It started life as a public address speaker for Winthrop Rockefeller's Arkansas gubernatorial campaign back in 1963. Effectively a special project for Paul Klipsch's friend, the La Scala soon made its way into the company's official product lineup. As these early scrawled line diagrams show, it was fully horn-loaded yet not as cavernous as the Klipschorn – and went loud without suffering the shouty 'horn sound' of many rivals.
Sold as an 'auditorium speaker' with a frequency range of '40-19,000cps', the original K-447 variant's driver complement was a K-33-J (Jensen) woofer and K-400 horn, K-55-V (Atlas) mid driver and K-77 (Electrovoice) tweeter. From then on, incremental changes were made until the La Scala II arrived in December 2005. This had thick MDF cabinetry instead of thinner plywood. Various upgrades followed, either with tweaked crossovers or – with the AL5 – also highly evolved drivers.