Why not horns?

Compression drivers for $76,000 per pair leaves me wondering what could possibly justify such a price. If my drivers were blocks of pure gold they might not be worth that much money.

I wrote the above entry yesterday with an eye toward hyperbole. Then this morning I wondered about the numbers and did this calculation.

My drivers weigh 7.3 lbs each or 116.8 ounces. Gold bullion is selling today for $1324.66 per ounce. So that works out to $154,720.29 per driver.

That is actually 4 times the price of the ALE drivers,so I exaggerated much more than I actually thought. Nonetheless, I'm still left wondering what could possibly make those drivers so costly. Does anyone know?

Limited production using finest materials since only selling a few costs are reflected in retail also yen is stronger than dollar last I looked. Now are GOTO or ALE worth the outlay I say yes but not in all cases I feel fostex t500amk2 to be better sounding tweeters than either ALE or GOTO. If looking for compression bass then these and maybe cogent are your only options. And yes I have used drivers from both.

I placed my AN15s back in my system and paired them with the Faital driver. The 18s DEFINITELY can't handle above 100hz. They're awesome subs for certain, but midbass is not their forte. The AN15s totally trounce them in terms of naturalness and speed of the midbass. Much less edgy and far more effortless and uncompressed. I'll potentially build a set of amps for the subs and use them for below 100hZ. Or maybe I'll just sell them because I'm fairly happy with the AN15s until the Alnico version comes out. The 18s are monsters though, really great subs, just don't know if I need them at the moment.

The FP driver is stellar though. I ran some tests on fuzzmeasure and it's EXTREMELY low distortion across its frequency band down to about 400hz. It's about -70dB compared to the last compression driver (a B&C driver) I tested, which was up at -50dB harmonic distortion. The neat thing is the FP driver's 2nd and third harmonic distortion graphs are identically low. Proof is in the listening -- sounds fantastic.

I had a visit last week from David Wall of Snob Productions. He installed and calibrated my XTA DP-224 Speaker Management System for me.
This effort replaced my DBX Drive Rack PA.

With a tool like the XTA in the hands of a skilled sound engineer like David, every parameter can be adjusted and all guesswork eliminated.

I don't think it is possible to get to this place with pre-packaged speaker systems. One amp per driver and universal adjustment capability has proved to be the answer for me. Turns out my horns are even better than I previously thought.