Why not horns?

There is not way to go from analog, to digital, and back to analog without losing information. That is just a physical fact.

I think Dan_ed is correct as the signal reproduced is a approxmation of the original,close but not exact.
As far as being able to hear a difference is probally based on how well the whole process performs and what the ear can detect.

Reproduced sound is merely an approximation of the original sound. How faithful that reproduction is depends on many facets and parameters. Trading better performance in one area for somehow compromised performance in another is what we mean when we talk about trade-offs. For some, the trade-offs in utilizing digital rather than analog might prove attractive. And it is very possible that the diminishment we see as factually inevitable may be practically absent.

Yes, Microjack. Exactly. It is all about trade-offs. I have heard my system using both digital and analog active line level crossovers. There is no question things change differently with the two approaches. I don't like what I hear with a digital filter in the signal path, others may be perfectly happy with it. All I wish to get across is that there is more than one way, just as there is more than one way to design a horn that performs very well.

Macrojack, you had me up until the DSP part. I've spent a lot of time with digital (using both DSP and plain vanilla) and analog recording systems. We use both in our recording studio. While digital falls flat on its face using the master files against the same thing on analog, DSP can only hope to make it worse, in the process of whatever its doing: EQ, compression, decompression, whatever.

I'm happy to keep an open mind but the DSP thing is really going to have to work at it to win me over.

Based on what Duke has imparted I would really like to try a conical horn, combined with a proper field-coil driver and crossover. It really **does** seem as if the potential of horns is still untapped.