Cogent horns

Such a large cash outlay for a small persevered benefit that I have not been able to hear or measure when I compared FC versions of dynamic drivers to alnico. Never tried FC comps. But with all things YMMV. I will stick to optimizing other aspects of front horn design for going FC for now. Still Cogent makes a cool horn loudspeaker I say more power to them. We need more horn loudspeaker designers on the bleeding edge. Maybe someday FC comps will be readily available and I will give them I try.

I have heard the Cogent field coil speakers a couple of times, lastly at The Show in Los Angeles circa 2006. It was a very small room and they were driven by Ron Welborne's new Terraplane 45 & 300B monoblocks.

As Paul mentioned, the sound was best described as "effortless" and "liquid". No matter how complex the material, the music just plain flowed with and ease I've never heard before. I'm not talking about a "soft" or traditionally warm tube sound. This was something entirely different. All the transparency and detail was there, staccato blasts from trumpet had the proper "blat" and bite, but there was glossiness or glare.

It's hard to describe except to say I have never heard any compression horn system present music in the same way as those field coils. They were incredible, both in performance and price.

I'd love to hear how far they've come since then.

My system performs according to your descriptions using the same conical horn that Cogent uses without the field coils. I have never heard Cogent drivers so I cannot say how close I am to what you heard, but it raises in my mind a question of how much is the horn and how much is the driver?

I meant to say that there was NO "glossiness" or "glare" in my above post.

Another memory popped up, I think Steve and Rich said they had to rush to finish the fabrication of [url=http://www.audiofederation.com/hifiing/2006/Cogent/1000/index.htm]the horns[/url] for THE Show in 2006 and just finished them a few nights before.

Macrojack, you've moved on to horns from the ZU's? Or in addition to?

I sold my Zu Presence last summer and bought a pair of horns from Bill Woods of Acoustic Horn Company figuring if they were good enough for Cogent they were good enough for me.
Bill also turned me on to B&C DCX 50 compression drivers which he says get pretty close to the performance of the Cogent FC drivers.

http://www.acoustichorn.com/news/index.php?id=6580107509037206863

If you have the space, this option is worth consideration.