Horns with good timbre and tonality?

Charney Audio and Volti are two to check out.

What about Blumenhofer? Anyone hear them? 
 

Klipsch jubilee had terrible timbre and tone. 
 

I can’t audition avantgarde.  

I did not hear Blumenhofer but I heard about them. I think, you are headed in a right direction. Don’t buy anything until you have auditioned them. If you cannot..well..

@ei001h wrote:

"I appreciate speed and dynamics with good timbre and tonality. I know horns are good with speed and dynamics, but not sure if they can do timbre and tonality like SF can."

I’ve been designing and building horn hybrd horn loudspeakers (horn + direct radiator woofer) with timbre and tonality as a high priority, as I’m also a dealer for SoundLab fullrange electrostats, which are arguably superb in those respects.

Imo the secret to natural timbre is, getting the reflection field right. When there is a spectral discrepancy between the first-arrival sound and the subsequent reflected sound, even if the first-arrival sound is very smooth, the net result is unnatural timbre and in some cases listening fatigue. So we want the reflections to have essentially the same spectral balance as the direct sound, modified only by the room’s acoustics.

Note that with live music there is relatively little discrepancy between the direct sound and the reflections. You can step outside the room where a live piano or cello is playing and listen from beside the open doorway with no line-of-sight to the instrument and instantly tell whether it’s live or not, even though you are not getting any direct sound.

Getting the spectral balance of the reflection field correct calls for paying particular attention to the loudspeaker’s radiation pattern, and in this respect not all horns are created equal. Ime what works well is a constant-directivity horn which does not rely on diffraction. Most horns do not fit this description.

Timbral richness also benefits from having a fairly well-energized reflection field, which implies that you don’t want the horn speaker’s radiation pattern to be too narrow.

You mentioned full scale symphony. The ability to convey the hall ambience on a good recording again goes back to getting the reflection field correct, as the in-room reflections are in effect the "carriers" for the reverberation tails on the recording. I can go into more detail about this if you’d like.

Best of luck in your quest.

Duke

@ei001h

I suggest adding Cessaro, Wolf Von Langa and Horning Speakers to your audition list. Head over to High Water Sounds in NY for audition.