Why not horns?

Unsound - The "distortionless driver" comment in my opening is hyperbole and you are not the first to call me on it. "seems like a no brainer" could be chastised as sounding kinda "valley girl" but it clearly stands as nothing more than opinion.
As for the "rip off" comment, I cannot apologize. I think that the pricing of many of the so called statement products are scandalous and most other stuff is unjustifiably priced.
Watt/Puppy 8 speakers are priced about the same as a loaded Camry. Let's not take a detour on that point, however. The only reason I mentioned it is because I think we can find better bang for our buck outside of the reviewer's boutique.

macro,

If I were you, I would temper my unwavering faith and passion with some more objectivity up front.

Objectivity will help get the facts people need to make decisions out on the table. Unwavering faith and passion alone might be persuasive to some, but the reality may come as a shock later.

Just my opinion....

Macrojack, there you go again. You use a small sample example to decry an entire industry. I don't suppose you'd say that for example the Vandersteen 2's are a rip off? Temperance my man. Ironically enough, part of my objection to horns are what I perceive to be their total poor cost to performance ratio.

Dunning-Kruger Effect seems many are suffering from this. You know who you are.

" Ironically enough, part of my objection to horns are what I perceive to be their total poor cost to performance ratio."

That is certainly true of some of the horns I have heard, especially the pure full range horn designs as opposed to the hybrids.

I would seriously consider testing the waters with something along the lines of a Klipsch La Scala, if I had the room, but I do not. Practically, a hybrid like a Heresy or Cornwall is about as large as I could possibly go.

Also, if I only ran one pair of speakers, the odds on me moving solely to horns would be small in that it will take a lot of tweaking and work under the best circumstances to get any other speakers to the point of being able to replace my OHM 5s, if even possible.

Smaller horns with some WAF could go into my wifes sunroom, but that is the only likely fit I see currently with my current system.

For many, a switch to horns could well trigger a total system revamp in that amps that sound good with high efficiency speakers are often different from those that work well with more common fare these days.

Rather than that, I would suggest a separate system perhaps powered by a suitable low power tube amp for many first dips into horn waters. I might do something like this as a separate bedroom system perhaps sometime in that I am interested in seeing how far the boundaries can be pushed with different technologies and approaches, and horns are unique enough in their strengths and weaknesses to warrant such exploration there. Also, I have already tested the waters on most other speaker designs, so horns are one of the more interesting candidates left.

BTW I started a thread a couple years back that is still around requesting info on "good cheap horns". Any new contributions to that thread would still be greatly appreciated.