Why not horns?

Well, my wife saw my wallpaper on my PC which is a photo of the room with the GOTO horns in them at Capital Audio Fest and says she likes the looks of the big conical plywood horn used CapitalAudioFestPics

We live in a neighborhhod with Victorian style homes including ours and the Grammophone like look appealed to her. We think alike in this way in that I think that is part of the appeal of horns to me, is that tie to the past.

So maybe there is a pair of big honkin yet retro styled horns somewhere in my future? Ya never know....

We live in a neighborhhod with Victorian style homes including ours and the Grammophone like look appealed to her. We think alike in this way in that I think that is part of the appeal of horns to me, is that tie to the past.

While the ancestral heritage of modern horns is most commonly associated with the gramophone and phonograph, for which the horn provided acoustical amplification without electrical signals being involved, it should be kept in mind that horns were also the leading speaker technology in the earliest days of commercial radio broadcasting. Those being the years between roughly 1920 and 1925.

Rather than providing mechanical/acoustical amplification of the vibrations of a stylus and an associated diaphragm, in radio applications a headphone-like transducer was used to convert electrical signals to sound, which in turn was amplified by the horn.

A nice collection of these things is shown here. My collection of antique radios includes a mahogany version of the Amplion Dragon (another example of which is shown at the upper right of that page), which to collectors is one of the more desirable models. I haven't yet tried it in my main audio system, though :-)

Best regards,
-- Al

Al, those are some very beautiful horns both from the perspective of how they look and what they represent!

So far I've watched just about every minute of the World Cup and I have to say that my horns reproduce the drone of the vuvuzelas very well. Of course, I've never actually heard a live vuvuzela chorus with which to compare but I'm convinced that the sound is convincing. Then again, who cares, the games are so engrossing and the announcers so entertaining that sound quality is the last thing I'm thinking about. Then again, perhaps there is an added value in having such a full throated, vibrant reproduction. Whichever, I can definitely see why the whole world is gaga about this game. Less scoring makes for more tension.

Well Macrojack, we do share a love of something; the World Cup. Of course I absolutely loathe those horns (vuvuzelas)!:-)
HUP HOLLAND!