Are Horn Speakers good or bad or simply a complete joke?

Many years ago I tried out a cheap University (brand) HORN midrange/tweeter with my Warfdale 12 inch woofer (which had a wool flanel surround, would you believe!). At the time I played a lot of Dixieland jazz, and the horn tweeter gave the most fantastic rendition of trumpets and trombones that I have ever heard. Of course, violins also sounded like trumpets.

The message here is that different speakers do different things well. How about a selector switch to cut in a Horn when appropriate.

The bottom line is that each and every speaker design will benefit from specific strengths, suffer from specific weaknesses AND contribute their own sonic signature to whatever is being fed into them. There is not a speaker made that can be distanced from the above generalization. Until we do have speakers that can make that claim, the selection of speakers will remain a VERY personal and subjective decision. Let's just hope that people are happy with whatever it is that they decide to buy / use and can enjoy their favorite musical selections with their speakers of choice, regardless of the various trade-offs involved. Sean
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Amen to Sean's post. C'est La Vie

I heard many horn speakers and I can say they're all joke EXCEPT Avantgarde, but they consider to be not full-horn speakers except Trios that cost $50k at least, but even with no woofers go down to 32hz flat.
Blw, you might not believe but you can adjust the stage so they will not be so immediate. For example you can schuffle arround with placement of midrange and tweeter, you can bend it backwards or forward, you can adjust the crossover depending on what amp you're dealing with. Despite for their ultra-high efficiency they still neet to be driven with preferably >=15W/ch amp in order to comply with woofer amp. It does take a good half of year to set them up to your perfection but I tend to believe to manufacturer about their precision of music they're designed for.

I just bought a pair of Altec 886A's for $75.00. hooked em up the other night WOW. I geta Hard-On when I listen to them.