Why not horns?

Dartford, I accept your assessment of what you heard. I am curious what horns you have heard. I realize that might be an extensive list and not worth the bother of recalling but given our diametrically opposed experiences it might help understand where you are coming from.

Macrojack, I would add Jeffrey Jackson and Dave Slagle to your list of cutting edge horn designers. Jeffrey is distributing a line of wood horns and they are collaborating on field coil designs. Check out the Hi Fi Heroin blog at this link to get an idea of how consumed these guys are with it.

http://www.jeffreywjackson.com/

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Lots of personal bias, limited experience, a passing listen now your an expert. Why forum response can be a true waist of time if real info is desired. I can have any loudspeaker design I want I choose horns. And no they do not honk have audible distortions that are problematic for all loudspeakers distort. Yes they image and bass is world class. You get far less thermo compression out of horn designs. After you hear what thermo compression does to musical dynamics hard to enjoy a non horn speaker after. Conventional loudspeakers to me sound like they are working hard to produce signal. A horn system sounds at ease never forced. To me proper horn loudspeakers do most performance aspects better than conventional designs, except, cost, size, maybe WAF. Still to me many with lesser systems who could never afford or get proper horns or loudspeakers past she who must be obeyed of coarse could never except the fact that horns are just better for music. Since this fact hurts to much to except they must make themselves happy with far lesser designs. ;)

Johnk, Looking at your system it raises an interesting question, what is a horn loudspeaker? In my mind you have a hybrid system that uses some principles of true horn design with more conventional non-horn characteristics, like the bass module and the super tweeter. Not that there's anything wrong with that. BTW, what's the tweeter. Is there a horn in that box?

To be a true horn IMHO the horn must be long enough to actually load the driver. Having a flared opening does not make it a horn. An example is what Avantgarde calls a Bass horn. It is really a woofer with a flared opening. The length of the flare is way too short to have much impact on the driver. Another hybrid would be a Lowther in folded horn cabinet where the vast majority of the frequencies are produced directly from the driver and just the bass comes from the folded horn.

Wonder how many who dismiss horns have never really heard a true horn?

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Its a good question.

Also lots of good answers that seem to help substantiate why horn loaded designs are a distinct minority.

Personally, I think I would like the sound of a good, pure horn design set up correctly, but I doubt it is something that I will ever have the incentive or motivation to pursue.

In general, I am not a fan of mixing distinctly different sounding driver designs into a speaker system.

My ideal driver would be a robust, high efficiency, full range, field coil based Walsh driver, but no such thing exists today TTBOMK, and if it ever does, it will probably be quite expensive and out of my realm.