What does one purchase after owning horns?

I would expect lower damping for the low end to be more sonically synergistic with horns and compression drivers than perhaps most others. I suspect it helps to loosen things up a bit overall and contribute towards lessening any edge in the sound that might be present otherwise.

Electronic music is often where the difference between a properly and under damped system can be clearly determined. Its perhaps where I hear the single biggest difference since moving to the small yet muscular still highly damped Bel Canto ref1000ms. Well recorded electronic music is totally controlled and visceral even at high volumes (at least with my OHMs) and truly hits you in the gut as it is designed to do without any mushiness, boom or other soft or looseness.

Shadorne you do not mention SPL level for conventional design distort much when near max SPL. Far more than a horn loaded design. I think maybe your looking for anything you can thats - about horn designs without understanding. A horn tweeter solves the distortion at higher levels as does not running loudspeaker into max SPL and using proper horn length flare. So horns are producing less distortion than conventional designs at most any SPL level. But if I knew little about horns or loudspeakers I would see the 20-30% distortion and run for the hills. So if you used proper horn flare and length didn't run at max SPL used a tweeters means no 20-30% distortion. Many conventional loudspeaker designs are producing 9-10% in low bass all the time no mater SPL. This is not a issue for horn loaded bass.

The primary benefit of horns is efficiency. They are also cool looking (but lets put that aside for now and just focus on function, not form).

The primary drawback is that doing full range horns well is difficult and expensive.

In the end I think its six or one half dozen of another.

You can get excellent sound and dynamics with or without horns, although the electronics required are likely to differ greatly.

Two totally different means to an end with different advantages and disadvantages, not just with the design of the speakers but the system as a whole.

Question: "What does one purchase after owning horns?"

Answer: Either better horns or other high efficiency speakers or most likely a completely different system end to end.

I have dropped this link many times:
[ur]http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html[/url]

It has to do with two different design, test and measurement techniques, both of which are alive and well in high end audio.

Weseixas subscribes to the Voltage paradigm which I subscribe to the Power paradigm. This gives us plenty of lively debate. I use the word 'paradigm' on account of the fact that quite often an individual who subscribes to a certain paradigm will have the opinion that anything outside that platform of thought is inherently 'wrong'. That's pretty much the definition of paradigm...

Anyway, several points. First, I did not make this stuff up. The Power paradigm existed before I was born (1956 for those keeping track) and, much like the tubes that are often at the heart of its tenets, failed to be displaced by the newer wave of transistors and constant-voltage theory that followed.

IOW it is quite possible to have bass that is not at all muddy, even with an amp that has a sizable output impedance. All you have to do is design a speaker that anticipates that, and Duke has mentioned one technique already. Now its a simple fact that all horns from the old days use these same design rules. When you try to use an amp that has constant-voltage characteristics on such a speaker, the crossover will not work correctly!! So the result is that the horn may well be subjected to frequencies it was not designed to reproduce. A lot of horns 'honk' when this happens.

IOW, horns got a bad rap on account of the fact that most of the old ones were not designed to work with transistors (in a nutshell).

Now the converse occurs when you use an amplifier with a high output impedance on a speaker that uses the Voltage rules in its design. For example, the woofer may well be seeing frequencies that the designer was trying to prevent it from seeing- perhaps an octave or two higher than it was supposed to go. This can cause the woofer to sound 'muddy'.

The bottom line here is that someone disparaging horns, amps with high impedance outputs, or planars and amps with very low outputs, **without taking these differences in design rules into account** is selling themselves short.

Now I am not an expert on the Avantgardes, but I can tell you that at least in the case of the Trio, it is one of the few horn speakers in high end that is designed to work with transistors or constant-voltage amplifiers. Consequently the task of finding a tube amp that sounds right on them is a big challenge. I suspect this is part of the reason why there are often blend problems when you try to use tubes on this speaker. So I have this advice: If you like tubes and you want a horn speaker, stay away from Avantgardes. It you already have an Avantgarde are you are trying to use tubes with it, now you know why its been so hard to find something that makes the drivers/woofers blend properly.

I find damping characteristics audible with all kinds of music, with all kinds of speaker/amp combos. How and why it all works, I will leave that to others here, who go beyond having just ears, such as myself.