What does one purchase after owning horns?

I don't think I've done this before, but...
I was commenting on another post and this seemed appropriate to this particular post. So I cut and pasted the last few sentences of that, as it relates to dynamics, horns etc. (I realized I write way too much sometimes, OK all the time).

Here it is...
This past Sunday, I was invited to a concert that a friend was conducting, a 40 piece 'BAND'...no strings.
During it, of course, I closed my eyes, pretending it was home stereo, (how 'bout that for full circle irony).
What was missing was pretty amazing.
Very little of the instrument specificity, (that may be something we simply 'apply' in orchestral works)in terms of location.
The MAIN thing missing (at home) is dynamic contrast. The zero to 115+db (and more) was startling. That, and the scaling of the various instruments and how different they are in that dynamic contrasting...piccalos are really, really dynamic, at least, they 'cut through', (no doubt a function of their place on the pitch scale and the human hearing 'curve') all the other instruments. Nature's way of allowing the piccalo to say, 'Here I am', even if I am a fraction the size of a Tuba!

All in all, it was a reminder of what Ngjockey said, AND how important it is to hear, (for me at least) accoustic music played. Moreover, it may, may have been a really good commercial for Horn Speakers--at least the dynamics made it a reminder.

Good listening,

"Two complaints have always been...'horn coloration', which I 'claim' to be able to hear that, (to me) characteristic 'horn sound'. That and the 'lack of dynamic' consistency between the horn and the bass 'drivers'.

"There's this discontinuity that I've always heard between those different drivers.

"So I'll ask--(Duke if he's out there), does this still exist?"

Hi Larry, well I think the colorations and discontinuities can be brought below the detection threshold for most people. On the coloration front, it starts with the design of the horn itself. My preference is for constant-directivity types that introduce as little diffraction as possible; this type of horn is often called a "waveguide". Its use calls for a fairly complex crossover so it doesn't appeal to many purists, but if the designer does his job well, neither you nor your amplifier would ever guess that the crossover is complex.

Addressing the dicontinuity issue requres a slightly different paradigm than what most people are used to. Instead of pairing up the best horn and best compression driver with the best woofer, we need to pair up the woofer, horn, and compression driver that work the best together. It's like Jim Thorpe, Muhammad Ali, Joe Montana, Tiger Woods, and Bjorn Borg are perhaps the best we've seen in their respective sports, but put 'em on a basketball court and the worst team in the NBA would eat them for lunch. The key is teamwork.

So getting back to horn speakers, we want to match up the dynamic capabilities of woofer and horn as closely as possible. That may mean using a prosound-type woofer whose thermal compression characteristics can keep with the compression driver. That may also mean not using the most uber-magnet hyper-efficient compression driver on the market.

The big thing I keep coming back to is the radiation pattern, and that's because it goes back to the most basic thing that our ears home in on: The frequency response. Most of the in-room sound we hear is reflected sound, so we can't afford to pretend like it doesn't matter if high fidelity is the goal. In particular, a radiation pattern discontinuity in the crossover region will let you know that there's a transition between drivers. The on-axis response can be smooth; the phase response can be smooth; and yet we hear the transition... in that case, look to the off-axis response! It matters because it's a far larger part of what we hear than is generally appreciated. Horns give us the opportunity to match up the pattern in the crossover region so that the off-axis response doesn't have a glitch there, and imho that should be taken advantage of.

I've had fellow speaker designers step into my room at an audio show and remark that they couldn't hear the crossover. That's either a high compliment about woofer-to-horn integration in the crossover region, or an admission that their ears are shot! I also have a customer who had one of my woofer + horn systems in a nearfield setup, so close that you could literally lean forward and touch the speakers. I expected to hear a vertical discontinuity when I sat down to listen, but with eyes closed I honestly couldn't. The apparent sound source was the center of the horn, and the crossover frequency was about 1.6 kHz. Now there may well be some instruments that would have appeared to come from lower, but in the course of listening to several songs I didn't hear it. This was unexpected, but indicates that, in some caes anyway, you don't need to be far back from a horn system in order for the drivers to integrate well.

Not that mine are the only systems that do this by any means, but mine are the ones I can speak from experience about. So take all of the foregoing with as many grains of salt as needed. This is all imho and ime and ymmv and etc.

Duke

Duke - Does a lower crossover point better conceal integration problems between a horn and a dynamic woofer? It seems that way to me. My own system crosses at about 350 Hz.

lrsky,
I always heard the discontinuity in my omega duos between the horns and the built in subs. one problem is the dynamic discontinuity and the other one is the time alignment (the horns are 2-3 ms ahead of the subs) solved that problem by employing very efficient corner subs and by applying delay on the horns.

I agree people need to listen to unamplified acoustic music to hear what dynamics are!! even a good horns system can't completely reproduce the dynamic range of an orchestra but it gets so much closer than anything else.
the difference between reproduced music at home and live unamplified music is mainly dynamic range!

macrojack,

using one of the cheapest nokia phones. don't need a smart phone. got a computer with internet connectiuon at home

Macrojack, this is a cat that can be skinned more than one way.

At first glance, it looks like a crossover of 350 Hz between a fairly narrow-pattern horn and a direct-radiator woofer would not have a good radiation pattern matchup, and I think is probably the case (though the horn may be unloading somewhat down that low, resulting in some pattern widening). But it may not matter if the crossover is done right.

You see, below 500 Hz in most rooms, the ear is not very good at hearing radiation pattern discrepancies as long as the power response is good (this is my understanding of Earl Geddes on the subject). Bill Woods knows far more tricks of the trade than I do (he has many fine prosound designs to his credit, some of which show up in home audio systems because they're so darn good). So I'm sure he has this transition worked out very well.

Turning now to the realm of dynamic matching, Bill uses woofers that have excellent dynamic capabilities and so their thermal compression will be negligible at any SPL remotely likely in a home audio setting, thus matching the compression driver in that regard.

Duke