Horns for SET: Low budget solutions

klipsch heresy for most of what you would get from a lascala....otherwise things get weird or expense, or both

Look at the Cain & Cain stuff, lotsa bang for the buck there!

http://www.cain-cain.com/audio/index.html

-RW-

Abdou,

I understand your mindset. I was where you are now when I was in grad school and had almost the same thinking.

The two most important thing you should do is ask yourself "what do I want?" and to do a lot of research before you make a decision. You will have to decide what compromises you can live with. The second point is that the, in my opinion, the mainstream audiophile community knows very little about horn speakers. Just a quick rant, but it seems sometimes that the mainstream community think horn speakers are just Lowthers, Fostex, AvantGarde or Klipsch.

There are two major categories of horn speakers, front loaded and rear loaded. Examples of front loaded horns would be AvantGarde and Altec VOTT while rear loaded horns include most Lowther and Fostex designs like Cain and Cain, Rethm, etc. [Note the Cain and Cain Abby is not a horn but a Voigt pipe]. Almost all of the rear loaded horns are folded horns where the 'horn' travel is folded so as to reduce space. Some horn purists do not really consider rear loaded horns to be real horns for various reasons.

One truism is that getting bass from a pure horn design (i.e. horn loading only) requires lots of space. This is a just a reflection of the laws of physics, marketing is not going to change this. The bass cutoff is governed by the size of the mouth of the horn. A true 20Hz horn needs a mouth on order of 8 ft. by 8 ft. and a lot of length for the horn expansion. Check out this link for pictures of a true deep bass horn. http://www.kbrooksaudio.net/custom.html

You can get 40 Hz in a large rear loaded horn. On the otherhand, the bass quality is fantastic. The bass speed and dynamics are hard to beat. In fact, the dynamics is one of the strongest points of a horn speaker. This is something that conventional dynamic speakers have a hard time beating. So you need to decide how much bass you want versus space and money?

The alternative strategy is to use a horn for the highs and mids and use a fast dynamic driver for the bass. You can add a sub to a backloaded horn ala Cain and Cain. My personal favorite is to use a compression driver horn mid/high coupled with a 12" or 15" bass driver. This is the formula for most of the Altec speakers. This works well because the cabinet can be made to a reasonable size with real bass extension while maintaining the dynamics.

Horns get a bad rap for "shout" and beaming. This is often the result of poor implementation. A horn has a natural tendency to beam due to the physics again. This can be countered by good horn design. Most audiophiles forget that for many decades, Altec horn loaded speakers were the industry standard for recording studios.

You will have to listen to some horn speakers to see if they are to your liking. Both the best sound (Shindo Latour) I've every heard and the worst (Loth-X rear loaded horn) were from horn speakers. For your situation, it might be that a horn speaker is not the right solution at this time. I spent several years pondering your very question and ended up not going the way of the rear loaded Lowther or Fostex. You might consider a single driver open baffle speaker as an alternative. I ended up sticking with high efficiency dynamic speakers and then moved to a pair of PHY-HP based speakers instead of the horns. I'm currently saving up money for a pair Shindo Latours.

If you really want to do horn speakers, I would recommend taking a look at a Altec 604 driver in a Stonehenge cabinet. Go to http://www.iconicspkrs.com/stonehenge.html. You can buy this speaker from Iconic or buy the drivers from Great Plains Audio and build the cabinet and crossover yourself. Another stragtegy is to get vintage Altec horns and bass drivers off ebay and build a speaker that way. It is not expensive if you stay away from the 288C, 802A, 515b, and 416A drivers.

Anyways, check out these sites for more information.

http://www.audioheritage.org/ (check out the forum for info)
http://melhuish.org/audio/horn.html

This is a no-brainer, the Horn Shoppe Horns are the best speaker value on earth and I am using them with 8wpc Dared Set amps. They portray the truth in musical experience. Go to Audio Circle and read the Horn Shoppe Forum. For $850 if you can afford that they are unbeatable!! Ed is the most approachable person in audio as well. They are hand built by him and his father. Sound is almost perfect. If you can put them close to the wall the bass will be ample.

If LaScalas are too large, then I'd look for a pair of Klipsch Cornwalls. A vintage pair can be anywhere from garage sale prices, which could be ridiculously low, to around $900 at the high end. Careful in pairing a sub off with horns. Horns are extremely fast and responsive, which can make them hard to keep up with (though certainly not impossible). There is a hybrid Frankenstein version of the Cornwalls that someone came up with using, I believe, the mid-horns from a LaScala. Appropriately the result is known as the Cornscala. I think you might be able to find some info on the Klipsch forums.

Marco