Calling all Horn lovers

Playing music through very high efficiency horns is the musical equivalent of looking through a microscope. Every minute detail will be more apparent, be it the music, noise, whatever. So lots of tweaks both large and small in scope may be needed to get things just right. I have heard a few horn based systems get it mostly right, and they are quite impressive! But not for those who just want to put something in place easily and be done with it in order to just spend time listening.

Expectations for horns these days with "high end" home audio users are much different than when they were first conceived out of necessity many years ago in the early days of "home" audio.

Due to their efficiency, horns are still a necessity for many commercial audio applications in larger venues. However higher efficiency and higher quality Class D amps impact even that these days. My gym uses commercial horn loaded speakers and newer commercial Class D amps for their group exercise programs. The horns are overkill IMHO for this application even in that the highly efficient and compact Class D amps do not require or even benefit from horn loaded speakers as did their earlier larger and less efficient Class A/B predecessors.


So horns are not for the faint of heart, but personally I still love them and would love to own a good pair someday.

Kiddman, I agree that if there is a problem in the design you will have anomalies, just like you do with any other speaker.

If the horn design is correct however, it can be one of the lowest distortion loudspeaker applications out there. So with this understanding, my comments above were concerning operation with properly designed and built systems.

"And flawed design is not why horns are often very dynamic. That comes from very low excursion, resultant great linearity, and the fact that the horn is an acoustic transformer, matching the impedance of the driver and the air."

Kiddman is correct. The pecieved dynamics of horn speakers is not an illusion caused by frequency peaks in the midrange.

That said, there are cone speakers with great dynamics, and Charles1dad, you have one of them. I remember hearing the Total Eclipses at a show years ago, and they have amazing dynamics. I should have bought them then, but I got sidetracked and stupidly bought a speaker I had never heard based on reviews. Anyway, you have a great speaker.

Also note that good full range hi efficiency horn systems will tend to be large and often quite expensive. But if you have the room to set them up well and the patience needed to get things integrated and set up just right, they are one of the ultimate and most unique statements, FWIW, that can be made in High end audio IMHO.

Yes, horns are very low in distortion because of the very small excursion required to produce a lot of sound. But, there is no way of getting around the effects of reflection/interference within the throat and flaring sides of the horn, as well as the effects of the horn itself being energized and resonating. It is not simply a matter of treating these things as "bad" and trying to minimize the effect; the "art" is in making these effects work to produce the kind of sound one wants. If it were simply a matter of reducing these effects, such as preventing the horn itself from resonating, proper design would be easier. But, I have heard various attempts to heavily dampen certain horns that were completely disappointing. These things have to be "tuned" -- meaning resonance and coloration have to be made to work in harmony with the sound one is trying to achieve, just trying to minimize resonance does not work.

Yes, I was speculating that, perhaps, some of the perceived dynamics is a product of peaky frequency response. That is not to say that horns have to be peaky to sound dynamic--all good horn systems sound more dynamic than most other types of systems. This was just my observation that some of the more musically balanced and least colored systems that I've heard, such as a well set up Edgarhorn system, were also on the dynamically tamer side of the horn family. The most dynamic and lively systems I've heard were actually not horn systems but systems with full-range drivers on open baffles, and these have WILDLY skewed and peaky frequency responses--hence, part of my reason for suspecting that tonal balance is involved.

I agree that the better horn systems are, unfortunately, huge in size. The best that I've heard generally had extremely long throats and very large openings. This allows the midrange horn to operate down to quite a low frequency (the bulk of the music will be produced by a single driver, which minimizes the impact of the crossover on the sound). I wish I had the room for such a system. The other "problem" with horn systems is the difficulty in blending any woofer with a horn midrange. Most woofer/loading schemes either don't quite sound like they are matching the clarity and "speed" of the midrange, or they don't actually go very deep if they do seem agile enough. I personally prefer more agile and less extension, but, there is some sacrifice involved.

But, even though most of the "best" I heard were huge in size, some smaller systems do remarkably well. Old examples include Western Electric 753 systems, some "newer" systems include the Tannoy Westminster (yes, it is "small" by horn standards."