Horns

Don’t listen to the audiophiles who assume all horns have a sound that is mostly negative. Much of the audiophile music that’s so cherished today was mastered on horn systems. Yet audiophiles will say you need to play back the way the artists intended then they proceed to play that wonderful Jazz or blues mastered on Altec TAD and RCA horns on a small chinless dynamic bookshelf or slim tower. Many of them have never owned horns or had any real experience with the many types of horn systems available. They have been told that horns are problematic. An old tail made up by 1950-60s audio salesmen to get mono speaker owners to dump the wonderful JBL Hartsfield for a crappy pair of AR. The old sales lines have been passed down by the audio press as facts. Just like they did with tube amplifiers and turn tables. Later they were proven very wrong it’s the same with horn designs.

Well what type of speaker used for mastering has no bearing on the quality of reproduction in your home system. For example those awful JBL speakers used in so many mastering studios for decades should be proof enough. The goal with speakers is to reproduce, as accurately as possible, the source material. Each speaker design contributes positively in different ways to this material. But the same thing always emerges from the horn crowd and it is dynamics and lack of dynamic compression. Legitimate points. You have to laugh when people claim to have heard a recording being made but are listening in the booth with whatever monitor the studio was using at the time. Instead of considering what the monitors used in the studio got correct, it is equally legitimate to consider what was missed by these same speakers.  

Oh and by the way, who is your source for the information about the 50s and 60s tactics to sell AR speakers? Perhaps you should say you dont like the old ARs and prefer horns. To assume that many of the negative opinions regarding horns arent based on listening is a bit of a stretch dont you think?  

List your vast horn experience. And please link to all these reviews based on listening tests that prove the point you try to make on horn loudspeaker systems. Or was I also wrong about how the press covered tube amplifiers and early digital? 

You said {For example those awful JBL speakers used in so many mastering studios for decades should be proof enough}. So what models of JBL are you referring to and when did you own or hear any of these JBL horns?