To horn or not to horn

Horns can be as smooth and transparent as any speaker made. Like any other kind of speaker technology there are bad examples and excellent examples as Duke pointed out earlier.


Horns don't have to be all that big. For example you can have a quarter wave rear loaded horn in a small floor standing cabinet, that can go down to 50-60Hz. At that point its easy to set up a subwoofer system (keeping it below the critical-to-human-hearing 80Hz), which is not a bad idea anyway if you don't like standing waves messing with the bass at the listening chair. One of the best distributed bass array systems is the Swarm made by Audiokinesis; if set up with a quarter wave horn as I just mentioned, you can have a compact and efficient system without sacrifice of sound quality compared to much larger systems.

I like the good ones. 

As others have suggested not all horns are created equal. However, I dislike a higher percentage of horn designs than any other speaker type. 

Heresy IIIs and a couple of REL subs does the trick for me. And my single ended tube amp has only 4 tubes so tube rolling is inexpensive (and fun, my preamp has 4 matching tubes but not expensive). Note that before I started looking around for efficient speakers to match my amp, I hadn't listened to any Klipsch speakers for years...I found that the Heresy IIIs had none if the drawbacks that horn critics famously have issues with, and each is a coherent and revealing little powerhouse even with less power. 99db efficient...yeah man...

Well... I've done the entire journey from low power & horns to mega power and Wilson's or Focal's at least three times over the last 25 years. For the last 5 years and will continue into the future with my horns driven by 300B's.  When done well, nothing can match a horn system IMHO.