Are Horn Speakers good or bad or simply a complete joke?

I love horns.I own Edgarhorns and built back loaded horns.

They have a scale,richness and dynamic ease that is very musical.

Where they fail though is phase coherency. Compared to point source,planar or a really well designed dynamic speakers they can sound a bit diffuse and softly focussed.This seems to especially apply to large midrange horns where phase relationships due the physical placement of drivers relative to each other[a long way apart] is difficult to align.So you get a bit of a phasey sound.Things like voices can wander around a bit in the soundstage.
Of course placing a point source driver in a back and front loaded horn as Tannoy does overcomes this and still gives the horn magic.

im running an oris horn ultra setup, that consists of an oris 150 with aer bd3 driver on top, and an oris 150 with a fostex p38 15" driver on the bottom inside berts referance cabinet, amps are welborne 45 drd on top and rawsonte gainclones on bass, signal through a supratek chenin pre. source is a vpi tntwith a graham 1.5 arm and a lyra beta cart, crossover is a welborne revell set at 160hz , sound is nothing short of excellent, every person that enters my home and hears the system leaves with a new appreciation for sound, and horns............i will never go back

Ro425,
Are you serious that J. Gordon Holt agrees with you that horns are superior? I question that.

Listener614, I still remember my first hearing of horn in the early '70s. A used pair of Klipschorns were sitting in the back room of a Tallahassee dealers hooked to a Dyna Stereo 70. The first piece was a snare drum which was so fast and loud that I almost fell off the high work seat I was sitting on. I bought them.

When it comes to speed and efficiency, there is nothing better. I am quite happy with my Tidals, but they are not a fast

Worked with horns for PA systems and theaters over 20 years ago. Never occurred to me to bring them home. Even back then, tried to sell custom line arrays with rare success (once). Not a typical line array by today's standard as it used a single horn tweeter, 6 X 10" and 6 X 5" and 2 amps per channel.