in article , Jon Conarton at
wrote on 1/11/06 8:30 PM:

I, spent years serching for a speaker I could listen to for hours on end
without fatigue. After spending tens of thousands on all sorts of dynamic
electrostatic ribbon etc, I happended to hear a friends Lowther Medallions
(full range single driver, back loaded horns) and I was hooked.
I ended up building the limited edition Fostex FE 166ES-R Back loaded horn
with results far exceeding my expectations. Here is the link where you can
see the finished product http://home.earthlink.net/~conartonj/ What do
they sound like? Take a listen to the Cain & Cain double horn ben at
$5500.00 and you will have a very good idea. I'll never part with these
horns they are without a doubt the most musically satisfying louspeakers I
have ever owned.
Jrook
Atlanta


"Robert Morein" wrote in message
...
Horns are bad. I became personally acquainted with this fact by ownership
of a Klipsch center channel, which had their "Tractrix" horn on the tweet,
the design of which supposedly mitigates the badness of horns. Supposedly,
making the horn contour according to the geometric figure known as the
cycloid provides the efficiency boost, without the penalty.

The reason horns are bad is a consequence of the physical concept of
"scale factor." Some problems are scale invariant, and some are not. The
horn is an impedance matching device, for which the physical size is
defined in terms of the wavelength of sound that is propagated through the
horn. Horns are in wide use to match a physical media with a high
impedance to a physical media with a low impedance, for both sonic, and
electromagnetic applications.

However, for a broadband audio signal, there is no single scale factor.
The "size" of the horn depends upon the wavelength, but as there is no
single wavelength in an audio signal, the horn appears to be of varying
"size", depending upon the frequency under consideration. The result is
that sound propagated through a horn has less phase coherence than was
present at the source.

As a counter to the above, one might say that all speakers, except those
with first order crossovers and sloped baffles, shift phase wildly anyway.
The ear is said to be largely insensitive to the lack of time and phase
coherence between the drivers of a multidriver speaker. So why would the
phase shift induced by a horn be so damaging?

No doubt some of the dictatorial individuals on this group will cite
certain findings that absolutely settle the question. Personally, I feel
that phase shift is probably damaging in the band where the human voice is
concentrated. I have witnessed a wide degree of variation in the degree of
vocal intelligibility of speakers. Some speakers are very pleasant to
listen to, and it comes as a shock that vocal intelligibility is poor.
Others apparently attempt to restore vocal intelligibility by nonflat
response. Still other speakers, a golden few, which seem to include
panels, manage extraordinary vocal intelligibility without any emphasis.
Some dynamic speakers are also in this group, and are not limited to
simple crossover designs. Perhaps these speakers avoid the critical region
in choice of crossover.

Returning to the original point, I have not personally been impressed by
horns. But despite the teasing title of this post, I do not believe horns
are bad. Like many other very pleasant speakers, horns probably give up
the ultimate in vocal intelligibility as an innate attribute of
"hornness."






Jon,

I just auditioned a pair of the Cain & Cain single horn ben at Atlanta store
and was really disappointed. Flabby, overstated & distorted bass. It could
have been the amp that drove it, but I doubt it.

I'm looking for a pair of JBL Century 100s if someone wants to part with a
good set.

Jon Y