The Kinghorn 💫

 

THE OTHER GIANT HORN OF THE 1950s: THE KINGHORN

The KingHorn is a fascinating Klipsch-adjacent artifact—and it's not a Klipsch product.

The KingHorn was an enormous experimental horn loudspeaker designed by John H. King Jr. His work was documented in an extensive paper submitted to the Newark College of Engineering in 1955. The actual KingHorn survived, and King's son Russell eventually donated it to the Klipsch Museum of Audio History. The museum says transporting the artifact involved a roughly 400-pound shipment.

What makes it especially interesting is the era. This was right in the formative period of serious domestic horn-loudspeaker experimentation, when PWK's Klipschorn was already demonstrating what a properly engineered folded horn could accomplish. The KingHorn represents another engineer tackling the same fundamental challenge: obtaining very high efficiency and low-frequency horn loading without requiring a straight horn the size of a room.

The original KingHorn itself is now part of the Klipsch Museum collection in Hope, Arkansas. That's significant because we're not merely talking about a drawing or an old academic paper—the physical experimental loudspeaker survived.