Why not horns?

Eldartford. What resonances are you speaking of ? I ask you all. Does your system have qualities of a live ,unamplified venue ? Live music does not "damp" anything. I am not clear of what you speak..... I truly believe many of you horn haters have not heard a "proper" horn set up. A shame, really....

Eldartford, cheesy horns do have resonances, the way many other speaker technologies do. A good horn has less resonance than the your speakers do though. Don't misunderstand me here, I totally empathize with people that have trouble understanding this last point!

As you point out, sound radiates as a spherical wavefront, no doubt why Quad made the ESL63 a semi-spherical device.

A horn often uses a diaphragm that has a similar semi-spherical shape, only it is much larger when it emerges from the mouth of the horn. This may explain why so many people, on hearing good horns, comment that they sound like the best planars, only with greater dynamic impact.

IOW my experience of horns is that planars are really the only thing that compete with horns for naturalness of timbre, coherence and detail- cones don't seem to keep up.
So I rate horns first if they work right (last if they don't), planars second in the firmament and cone systems last.

Mrdecibel,

Every hi-fi system will have that one track where it shines, it's when confronted with differing music types, is where most fails.

I love my non-horns ..........

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06-18-10: Mrdecibel
A cd recording from 1984 on the Denon/Nippon Columbia Japan label : Eddie Gomez : 38C38-7189 - 9 tracks - A recording , inho, where many systems fail.....it is jazz and has it all.....I love my horns !

06-18-10: Mrdecibel said " I truly believe many of you horn haters have not heard a "proper" horn set up" ...

This might be true Mr decibel , heard my first on in 1973 my last one last week , so in 37 yrs nothing , not one good horn setup .. from the home made ones , to others costing tens of thousand ... nothing Hmmm and it's not hate mr D, it's just not my cup of tea objectively or subjectively...

I do believe you non-horn haters have never heard a "proper"
speaker setup ... a shame !

LOL..

Atmashere ,

You leave out one critical part of your thesis, planers radiate sound from both sides , this ability helps to create the required space and time of a recording far more accurately than any monopole transducer.

Horns will always sound like hi-fi, never real , they project sound in a manner where all instruments and voices have the same projection and size. The best you can say is that they sound just like an amplified concert 40 ft away. Unfortunately we listen to recordings of live music and not live music itself , as such Horns do not convey this as accurately IMO.

A good planer setup will do everything for power as a good horn setup will and sound more like real instruments to boot.

Anyone who says a good planer sounds like a horn or vis a vie has never heard a good planer setup ...

Regards,