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donavabdear, do any of your Genelec speakers have the dynamic correctness and dynamic excitement and immediacy of a large properly designed fully horn loaded system with horn bass in the low 20s Hz range, DSP crossed over, speaker corrected, room corrected, phase and time corrected speaker system?

@kingharold —

We know the answer to the part of your post prior to “DSP crossed over …” That is, they remain unresponsive here because they’d have to give us an admission, but if pressed they will likely counter thar the traits pointed out by you on all-horns are unfit for domestic environments. To many an MFR it seems even their weaknesses have to be sold off as the opposite.

I won't speak for @donavabdear, but I will speak for myself that the question is essentially irrelevant and is begging an answer. Phase corrected is essential for any working speaker design, time corrected looks much better on a marketing sheet than providing verifiable listener benefits. And yes, I have personally done the testing. Dynamic correctness, dynamic excitement seem to be implying the same thing. How long can you play, and what effects of any concerning dynamic compression. Horn loading / compression drivers is not the only way to achieve this of course. Horns provide, properly designed, constant directivity, but using a standard woofer/mif-woofer and a wave guide tweeter provides similar benefits without the side effects of vertical directivity lobing which can cause unpleasant reflections off vertical surfaces, likely one of the reasons why some people "don't like horns".  I think we can agree that a real horn loaded speaker at 20Hz, even a tapped horn is rather enormous and outside the realistic realm for most people. To achieve true directivity at the frequency is just unrealistic and you are not going to avoid room modes. Velocity/position feedback eliminates power compression issues in subs, and cheap efficient amplification is plentiful. Just put in a bunch of power subs and be done with it.

@donavabdear already wrote he only has one sub for his Genelec system (maybe in a different thread, I lost track).  @donavabdear , I have to expect that is contributing to some of the difference. I would consider playing around with integrating your main subs the the Gens even as an experiment. That or play with the single sub near-field. Not sure why this came to mind, but someone asked what the best sound they could get for a $1000 was. I told them $500 headphones and near field sub for the emotional impact.

@thespeakerdude integrating the subs, that's a good idea, it would be very easy. I'll let you know. Also your advise about the headphones is spot on, exactly right.

 @kingharold Sorry it's been a while since I have listened to horns with respect to accuracy. Time alignment is working ok not great, I have to move the speakers physically to get everything right. DSP seems like a fix but not really. The front speakers are time aligned and they are imaging like I've never heard before the point source nature of the speakers is different than the Tannoy or Uri or older Genelec speakers I've heard in the past I very much disliked those older speakers but these new Genelecs are really different, they worked out imaging, transients, and dynamics to a much greater degree. As far as dynamic correctness, hard to answer that i don't think there is any speaker that can reproduce thunder or a real symphony because no microphone can record it, even our ears don't treat dynamics as opposed to transients in the same way. Probably dynamics will be the last sound variable figured out in sound playback because there is nothing that records the loudest sounds properly. I used the very best recorders and microphones available to record production sound on movies and TV I've recorded 100s of thousands of gunshots but none of the recordings sounded like the real thing. On the movie Pearl Harbor we used the real 50 caliber guns these guns were mounted on steal surfaces the ships they were so loud the camera operators had a hard time physically moving their bodies because of the sound pressure waves the guns created. Real dynamics, impossible. 

That or play with the single sub near-field. Not sure why this came to mind, but someone asked what the best sound they could get for a $1000 was. I told them $500 headphones and near field sub for the emotional impact.

Or aa Butt Shaker(TM).