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

It's an old thread, but I don't care...

I love the sound of horn speakers. My purchase in 1975 of a pair of Altec 846 B Valencias is the best $600 bucks I ever spent.

So very efficient and yet so powerful. The punch, the clarity, and the dynamic range cannot be described. And now that I'm beyond my heavy metal days, they are even more amazing to me now that I've rediscovered how great they sound at low volume levels.

I am in ecstasy with my recently acquired acapella high violons - I was not a horn fan until I heard these & the midrange is totally artefact free & life-like & mated with that awesome plasma tweeter... & yes Bob, I am amazed at the dynamic & holographic sound from the horn at low levels which is fabulous for late night listening - I may well sell my stax omegas now - I think the violons are more detailed & yet more relaxing in the HF than these world class cans.

Hi JDSpratt

I owned the avantgarde duos and never ever got on with them. Great dyamic shadings, but if you wanted to reduce their harshness in the upper octaves by change of room placement or alternative gear you would have to sacrifice the deatiled transparency. Furthermore the bass sound was awful and its integration with the rest of the speaker was even worse.

It painted in light strokes and there was never any escaping that whatever you used. Boy did I use equipment like there was no tomorrow.

I am looking for alternatives and would like to have that excitement of horn speakers with the solidity, soundstaging and tonal warmth of cones. I wonder if the acapellas are the ones for me.

Luke

I bought a pair of Avantgarde Duos 2 years ago - best upgrade ever in 25 years of hi-fi. I started off selling hi-fi with Ken Kessler - I'm now a surgeon. Nevertheless, I have been imbued with a tube and vinyl ethos, which I've kept for all this time.
The Duos have been a stunning upgrade; even my wife thinks they sound good. She doesn't care about hi-fi - all she wants is a Steinway; she's a family practitioner as well as a pianist. The Duos are even more stunning than when I mounted my Garrott Brothers London Decca Cartridge back in 1980, which was awesome. It's true that you have to spend time setting them up, but that's true of most high end kit esp turntables.

Just FWIW... to get horns and other high efficiency speakers to sound right usually involves an amplifier with a relatively high impedance output. Nelson Pass published an excellent article that raised this issue in Audio Express around the beginning of this year.

High efficiency speaker tend to be highly reactive and do not take kindly to overdamping! So the best sound is usually with an amplifier of higher output impedance. This, combined with the fact that tubes sound better then transistors anyway, is why SETs and OTLs are the best amps for horns. Just about any other combination will get you shrill results due to the reactive nature of the speaker.

IOW, horns are not shrill by nature. They get this reputation from being used with the wrong equipment!