Why not horns?

A hoosier!! Definitely beyond my radius. I haven't been that far east in almost 10 years.

Hi Terry, you are a known to be harmless wacko so welcome at any time :>) I had lunch with Nathan last month and he seems to be doing well. It would be nice to get the old gang together. I can accommodate a small crowd but need to get my wife out of town for a few days.

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an admitted naive observation from a bachelor........

Why is it that we need to figure out ways to get the wifes "out of town" whenever we want to have a little audiophile fun? It seems to me that they don't plan on ways to get the men out of town whenever they have their little parties. To the contrary, they plan the party and we pretty much go running! LOL! (Hmmmmm. wait a minute!.........)

Back to the thread.... Why not horns? Well, because they sound like horns. My friend has meticulously set up his Trios with 3 pairs of bass horns in a dedicated and purpose built room with every little trick and room correction you could think of.
Mighty mighty impressive dynamics. Sometimes feels like I can hear the nose hairs moving in the recording. But ultimately only fun for a little while. I always come away feeling as though I have listened to a well constructed parlor trick rather than a live musical event.

*shrug*

Hey guys just give the wife a credit card with a reasonable set limit and a gps with all the malls programmed in the points of interest;that might work;this has been a pretty good thread for someone who never knew anything about horns such as myself.

I got to attend the Capital Audiofest event in Rockville, MD this past weekend. This was a small but very nicely done event.

THere was a range of pricepoints in equipment there, all the way up to several systems demonstrating the best face of some of the most highly touted gear around, like mbl, Magico, yg acoustics, and various others. There were at least 4 systems I can recall that used horn loaded speakers, a very high % of the systems overall I thought, with results ranging from just OK to most impressive.

I spent the most time (a good hour or so) in the Luminous Audio room, which featured a large 4 way custom horn speaker system that somewhat resembled Avantgarde in design, complete with moderate size, corner loaded, dual bass horn boxes on both sides.

These were being demoed with what I would describe as a no holds barred, cost is no limit system, which was exceptionally well done in all regards, particularly in regards to phono source however.

I think I pretty much heard what I was expecting from such a system, and it was most impressive and hard to fault, though the range of music demonstrated was limited to mostly vintage classical and jazz material. I would have liked to have heard a wider variety of music, but that is not where this demo of this system was geared towards.

Unsound, having heard this system and based on teh sound, I suspect you might reconsider if you had the chance to have this particular system including the horns in your home somehow!

Of course, the main aspect of this system that caught my ear compared to everything else at the show was the dynamics, transient response and overall clarity of the presentation. Soundstage and imaging was well up to snuff as well.

There were two things that I still wondered about afterwards. One was who can afford this stuff, and two was I must admit my head hurt a bit afterwards while driving home. I attribute that to just the overall volume and natural dynamics of the system rather than any faults of the system itself. Were I at the symphony sitting that close to the orchestra in full swing, I'm certain I would feel the same way afterwards.

Regarding the otehr systems featuring horn loaded speakers there, they were mostly all quite nice, somewhat impressive and well behaved (not honky or anything like that), but no others left much of a unique impression on me. The Cathedral speakers room was the other horn based speaker setup that I found myself not wanting to stop listening to, although the material and performance volume there was much more reserved.