How come Horn + woofer designs are not more popular?

Poorly designed horns sound shouty. Many good horns do as well until you add some damping material to them. I can’t understand why manufacturers don’t do this. I have designed and modified many speakers over the last 40 years. Every speaker design type can achieve excellent performance. JBL and Klipsch are good out of the box, but can become exceptional with a little work. 

Good grief. Opinions are like belly buttons. 

If if you like the sound of horns, crank em up, sit back and enjoy them with a cocktail. If not, crank up your domes, or planar speakers, or whatever floats your boat. You too can enjoy a cocktail.

Enjoy the long weekend gents, and take a moment to reflect on the reason for the holiday. 

Does anyone ever listen to music anymore, or are you thinking about the hardware you use to recreate the musical moment too much? Other than junk thrown together with no knowledge at all, most good systems do a great job of retaining the UNKNOWN mix information locked into the great number of recording methods known and now used as inputs to these "magical" boxes called music systems. I was born before Pearl Harbor into a family who used a Brook 10-C3 and an RCA LC-1A 15" duo-cone speaker before there were any stereo systems (or binaural). Music still sounds good, regardless of how old I get. Give this a thought... nothing is perfect, especially the initial recordings (and yes, I owned a recording studio). It's all good, if you think about it.

For many years, most every Radio Shack store across the country had a pair of Realistic Mach model horn speakers playing in the front of the store. Big and impressive looking but the worst sounding shoutiest Radio Shack Realistic brand speakers ever. I could not stand them no matter how hard I might try to like them. This alone gave horns a bad name for me and many "audiophiles" I suspect. That and the many commercial setups out there that are mediocre at best by "audiophile" standards. I still hear one of those at my gym most every day.

Mass exposure to bad horns has biased many I suspect. Gives the good ones a bad name.

Maybe those Realistic horns would have sounded better with a tube amp.....

Also did I mention that this kind of speaker tends to be big and heavy and most likely fewer people than ever want to have to deal with them these days?

I’m not saying they are bad.....some these days like the newer Klipsch are quite good and even reasonably affordable, just pointing out the reasons why they are not "popular" as asked. One could even argue that the entire modern Klipsch line IS pretty popular. You see them everywhere possible these days and they get a fair amount of press coverage.....just not here.

Also I gotta point out that most products popular here are NOT very popular as a whole....very few people overall own most of the products that get a lot of attention here. High end is "high end".....not "popular" in general.  Klipsch Heritage line might be one exception to that.

roberjerman-- I have a pair of Speakerlab 6WA's sitting in my basement, I bought them in college in the late 70's, kept them because I knew how good they sounded.  Haven't taken them out to listen, but might do it this weekend.  Have a Hegel H360 with Raidho XT-2's and love the sound.  Actually haven't made the move to digital yet-- have an Oppo 105D for SACD's, HDCD's (have a lot of them owing to big G Dead collection) and plain old CD's.  Only potential problem is that the speaker inputs on the Speakerlabs don't accept bananas, just straight wire.  They are cheap old spring type terminals.