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

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!

funny how nearly in every single set up i have heard horn speakers in the final result is still the same. I have heard the avantgardes with valve amps in hifi shows and in my own room. I am not denying you cannot get a smooth response at the top end but this is almost always with sacrifice to the overall transparency and imaging (what little there is that is).

Furthermore horn lovers are not the ordained ones, horn speakers are outnumbered in the high end systems with low powered triodes etc. I bet by 10:1 at least. Are we saying therefore the rest of the audiophile fraternity are thick?

Not at all. Horns, like cone speakers, come in a variety of performance capabilities. IOW, some work very well, are highly revealing and others pretty much suck at the same task- just like cone or for that matter planar speakers. It would be throwing out the baby with the bath to assume that just because one horn speaker sounds terrible, that they all do!

Luke,
I have found the violon highs indeed a joy, wonderfully musical & a sight to behold. I am about to get the esoteric p-01/d-01/g-0s system with them in a few weeks - the plasma tweeter is aparently even more of a revelation with excellent SCAD playback. Do an audition, life is short & the pleasure you'll get from these speakers is in the same league as great sex.
Dr Jonathan Spratt