What does one purchase after owning horns?


I have owned Avantgarde Uno's and sold them because of the lack of bass to horn integration. I loved the dynamics, the midrange and highs. Now faced with a new speaker purchase, I demo speakers and they sound lifeless and contrived. The drama and beauty of live music and even the sound of percussion insturments like a piano are not at all convincing. I have an $8k budget for speakers give or take a thousand. My room is 13'X26' firing down the length. Any good ideas will be appreciated. My music prefrences are jazz/jazz vocalist.
renmeister

Showing 6 responses by duomike

I totally agree with chadeffect. once you get used to the effortless dynamics of a good horn system it will be very difficult to enjoy ANY planar speaker. you have already sold your unos, otherwise I'd have made some suggestions how to overcome the bass integration problem.
regarding bass integration of the horns with the powered subs I'd like to comment. using duos and later omega duos, highly modded, since many years. the problems some people are hearing are real regarding bass integration. it's a time delay thing. just look at the stereophile review of uno nanos in late 2008, especially the step response. the bass is at least 2 ms behind the mid horn. this is a long time.I'm using digital delay to fix that issue. makes a big improvement to my ears. another issue is the built in amp sits directly behind the drivers, not a good thing.
for owners of duos and uno I'd like to suggest to remove the subs from the frame and place them roughly 2 feet in front of the horns. this will not only helps with bass integration in the time domain, it will also greatly benefit the horns because the subs vibration won't reach the horns anymore!!
regarding distortions of horns I remember a very old stereophile review of the original duo's from '97.
martin collums measured THD at 110 db! the midhorn had only around 0,1% THD and the tweeter 0,3%. I doubt even a speaker like wilson's alexandria could compete with that.
of course the build in sub had much higher distortions at that level.
believe many planars would get fried when attempting to measure their distortions at that level!
I think it was measured at 1 m distance, at a typical distance of 3 meters the volume would be down by a few db so the measurement was not that unrealistic. Guess he had to crank the volume up that much to get any thd to measure.
IMHO horns even played at peaks of 90 db only (which even a decent planar can reach) sound more dynamic than other speakers. they just seem to be able to follow the volume swings of dynamic music more correctly. one reason might be that because of their inherent efficiency the voice coil never sees large currents and heats up.
lrsky,
I always heard the discontinuity in my omega duos between the horns and the built in subs. one problem is the dynamic discontinuity and the other one is the time alignment (the horns are 2-3 ms ahead of the subs) solved that problem by employing very efficient corner subs and by applying delay on the horns.

I agree people need to listen to unamplified acoustic music to hear what dynamics are!! even a good horns system can't completely reproduce the dynamic range of an orchestra but it gets so much closer than anything else.
the difference between reproduced music at home and live unamplified music is mainly dynamic range!

macrojack,

using one of the cheapest nokia phones. don't need a smart phone. got a computer with internet connectiuon at home