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

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.

speakers are the most flawed part of a system. no matter what speaker you use almost, if you have a good front end and amp you will get at least reasonable sound. single-ended amps are the best sounding amps something like using a crossoverless speaker. there is a certain purity to them that a speaker as critical as a horn requires for best sound. the idea that one uses a horn speaker only because of their sensitivity to play their low powered se amp is just wrong. horns deisgned to give a semi-spherical wave form (like avantgarde and others)combined with their inherent low distortion are theoretically the ultimate way to go. horns with well damped flares will have low coloration to boot.