Why not horns?

Marty, my comments were not addressing your post, but thanks for the follow up. What you say makes sense and may help explain issues that some have with horns. Macro, thanks for keeping an open mind about my personal experience. I, like many others use these forums to learn about differing technologies and how they are best applied. Horns are no exception. They have many desirable virtues, such as those I mentioned in my previous post. But before I would ever consider restructuring my entire system around a set of horns, I would have to hear a set do the things I find important to musical enjoyment.

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.

Take some time to examine this design.

http://www.techfx.us/web/insubnia/Exodus%20Anarchy%2025hz%20TH.pdf

It is said to provide horn bass down to 25 Hz. in room. I would suppose that means upward extension to about 125 Hz. These are small enough and cheap enough to build for many of us to consider using them in a distributed bass arrangement. I've been thinking about it and wondering about how it sounds. Anybody here able to answer that question?

Horns have unexploited potential. Lets get busy harvesting their potential. Most other options seem to have reached their limits long ago

Horns are great. They are the BEST solution for many applications.

However, you cannot dismiss other options so summarily. You are generalizing too much.

A good horn in the right setup can be the optimal solution, just as a conventional dynamic driver can be optimal in another situation.

For example: What about the midrange. Most horn designs crossover around 800 to 1000 Hz. Many people believe this is not a good region to have a crossover, as it is right bang square center in the sweetspot of all music.

All designs involve trade offs. Horns have some extremely useful characteristics for live audio and stadium audio. In fact they are probably the best #1 choice in most large venue live applications - as the narrow dispersion allows better control of the sound field so each listener gets an optimal experience. Line arrays are another powerful tool for live venues. However, these advantages do not always translate to making these designs the #1 choice in the home or in a studio.

Horses for courses.