Why not horns?

Horns can be designed to work great at less than 10ft sitting distance depends on design.

Lots of impressive horn setups on this site.

This may be the most impressive set of horns I have seen here:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1225733731

Johnk - Since you know what you are talking about, it would be helpful if you would explain your points rather than just issuing pronouncements that people like me cannot understand. Why would a front loaded bass horn need to be 25 x 25? Why is this not true of a rear loaded horn? How is it that horns can be designed to operate at less than 10 ft. listening distance? Would this horn be front loaded?
Part of the reason I started this thread was a hope that doing so might clear up a lot of the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding horns.

Great questions. John and Ralph are way ahead of me with horns but I think we are now getting to the reason why more horn systems are not found. Horns do some things similar to boxes but they also many things differently than boxes. There is simply a lot to learn about how horns work when one attempts to setup a horn system. This is especially true when one is doing a multi-driver system. The size of the mouth opening, the size of the horn opening, the flare rate, etc, all impact the freq. response and sound. And we should be considering whether the horn uses a full range driver, or if the horn is front or back loaded.

I listen rougly 11' from my horns. Ralph hit all of the reasons why we hornies like what we like about horns. It is NOT about volume as so many of the uninitiated think. I rarely listen about 90dB even with rock. I don't need to because I can hear very far into the background which I believe is indicative of a very low system noise floor.

And I chose to build a horn system long before I figured out what amps I would use. In the end, I am triamping. One 50+ watt/ch, PP amp for the mid-bass bins, another 50 watt PP amp for the mid and tweeter, and the bass horns are powered by a pro-audio SS amp. This is all controlled by a Marchand active xover.

So you can see that it can go from very simple to very complicated when we talk horns. Most peoples' eyes, especially those here at A'gon, start to glaze over very quickly. :-)

As Herman pointed out back loaded horns really are not horns at all. But this has been debated to death in other forums so most agree that a BLH design is a horn. Most as is mine is a combo or large ported cabinet firing into flared TL. Thus able to produce far lower frequency than equal size front horn. To reproduce 15hz a front horn needs to be near the size I mentioned. Most horns for monitoring or closer seating are hybrid designs horn tweeters horn mid standard woofers. I use a massive horn system in my office. I took much care with driver, horn integration, time alignments thus I can sit about 6ft from such. Hard to answer your questions for I'm not a technical writer just a designer. Some can do both not me sorry. I'm lucky I can write at all not my strong point. I does bother me a wee bit that so many in this thread say what I do and listen too can not be done but hey I know it can maybe thats all I need. I think herman was thinking my rigs a bit smaller than it is.