To horn or not to horn

Heresy IIIs and a couple of REL subs does the trick for me. And my single ended tube amp has only 4 tubes so tube rolling is inexpensive (and fun, my preamp has 4 matching tubes but not expensive). Note that before I started looking around for efficient speakers to match my amp, I hadn't listened to any Klipsch speakers for years...I found that the Heresy IIIs had none if the drawbacks that horn critics famously have issues with, and each is a coherent and revealing little powerhouse even with less power. 99db efficient...yeah man...

Well... I've done the entire journey from low power & horns to mega power and Wilson's or Focal's at least three times over the last 25 years. For the last 5 years and will continue into the future with my horns driven by 300B's.  When done well, nothing can match a horn system IMHO. 

And I would say that when done well, horns do a very particular thing better than all other designs. The sense of ease you get with horns is really special. This can be intoxicating for a time, but to me always falls short in all other areas when compared with the best dynamic and planar designs. 

@needlebrush --

I have never owned a horn speaker. I’m curious if there are any who are first time horn speaker owners after having owned other types of speakers for many years, and are you glad you switched?

My switch was gradual, from Direct Radiators to hybrid designs (2-way, waveguides + DR woofers), then to all-horn mains augmented by a DR sub and finally the same mains coupled with a pair of tapped horns subs instead.

This goes to show the following: if you want to truly consider a horn speaker system then it must rightfully function as such in the entire frequency spectrum you’re using it or intend to use it in, or else it’s not a true horn speaker system (but rather a horn-hybrid). Period, end of story. In the same fashion one doesn’t call a hybrid vehicle with both a combustion engine and electrical motors for an electric car, but rather a hybrid.

Suffice to say, if you really want to wrap it all up coherently there’s no way around horn-loading into the sub bass range as well - indeed it’s much more important than one would immediately believe. Most people don’t even know what horn-loaded midbass sounds like, not to mention extending it into sub bass, but it adds a particular ease, easy-flowing presence and sense of being enveloped to the sound that sets true horn speakers apart from direct radiators and even horn-hybrids.

No doubt; to me the switch was absolutely worth it, but it takes dedication for a number of reasons. There’s also size to consider, for while poster @atmasphere pointed out horn-loading down to the midbass can be had from a physical package not too excessive in size, relatively speaking, with sub bass via horns you can’t dodge the need for size.

Once there however having chosen a quality implemented all-horn set-up, which is not not necessarily easy nor cheap to come by (unless you go DIY), it really is a different kind of listening experience, and one that by nature distinguishes itself from the sound of direct radiators and horn hybrids - positively, I find. Most may think of horns in terms of dynamics and SPL-capabilities (with an implied sense of crudeness, perhaps), but quite a few have commented on the sound of my set-up being especially suited to music with live acoustic instruments (classical and jazz), well-recorded voices, as well as blues and the techno/trance/etc. genre. The least attractive sounding music via my set-up is a lot of the pop/rock genre that sounds the way it is: artificial, often overproduced and compressed.

Whenever someone says as an absolute that all horns are "honky", "bright", "forward", etc. I usually discount any opinion they have after that. Horns can be all of that or none of that. But so can many other designs. With care in system choices and room treatments, horns can be very, very good.

Oz