How come Horn + woofer designs are not more popular?


A couple guys on my audio discord really love the JBL synthesis 4367 and feel that all traditional 3 way tower speakers suck because they have poor bass response and are generally shy sounding. What I wonder is how come the majority of speaker makes do floor standers that are 3 way as oppose to the Horn +woofer design of JBL?

Is there any downsides to the horn + woofer design? Can a horn convey microdetail as well as a Be tweeter like say from magic A or S line? They claim 3 way floor standers are just trendy. But is there anything more to it then that?
smodtactical
I am very happy to hear the K owners come on here and talk about their wonderful systems. Yes, I feel they are still amazing, especially with the updates, modifications and tweaks shared by the Klipsch community. But a question for gw _smith. What are you referring to when you say " large mid horn " ? and " that's an 8 inch bass horn wrapped up in a very small space " ? I am a 50 year Klipsch Heritage veteran ( not an employee ), and I am not understanding either of these statements. Would you please, care to explain ? If you would like to private message me, that would be fine as well. Enjoy ! MrD.
The answer to this thread's question surely must be that it's a matter of taste and preference. I have to confess to a certain prejudice against horns in general. I'm a sound engineer, and having mixed a hundreds of concerts, the sound of horns has never appealed to me. Guess it's that "shoutiness" and edginess that even the best PA horns exhibit that turns me off. I like my sound a little warmer and more image-realistic than what I've perceived from horn-based systems, I guess. I listen to Magneplanars at home, and every time I sit down in front of them, I can sense an internal, inaudible "ahhhhh". They just suit my taste.

A couple years back, I had the fortunate opportunity to take part in a double-blind mono test between a Revel Salon2 (very high-end, 6-way, traditional dome-tweeter design) and JBL M2 ("master reference" horn-based 2-way design) speaker. Both were free-standing behind a room-spanning scrim, and both were slid into place to exactly the same listening position alternately, as 10 samples of different kinds of music played via a high-end front end and amps. It was visually impossible to tell which was in place at any point, and levels were carefully matched. Both speakers are Harmon products voiced by Harmon.
Needless to say, both speakers sounded good, but there was a distinct difference in their character that gave away the M2s every time. There was about a dozen of us doing the listening, and we recorded our speaker preference for each sound sample. Post analysis showed that I preferred the Revel on every sample, and to my ears during the test, it was obvious which speaker was which. I just couldn't warm to that up-front, in-your-face shoutiness of what is admittedly maybe one of the best and accurate horns designs of all time. (The M2 is a lauded studio monitor speaker.) For what it's worth, only a couple of folks out of the dozen of us preferred the M2s on most of the samples.

What the test told me was not that one speaker design was better than the other, but that they were definitely distinctly different. Most folks preferred the domed tweeters over the horn in that test. That's a pretty small sample size, but it could be indicative of a much larger population's preferences. Maybe it answers the question that is the title of this thread. Maybe horns aren't more popular, simply because other types of high frequency transducers suit more folks' tastes a little better.

BTW, if you want an exhaustive thread of over 1700 posts on that blind test, it's on AVSForum here: https://www.avsforum.com/forum/89-speakers/2907816-speaker-shootout-two-most-accurate-well-reviewed-...
The testing was monitored and mentored by no less than Dr. Floyd Toole. A big shout out to John Schuermann and his crew for setting it all up and wrangling it all through the test. It was an altogether fantastic experience for these ol' ears.



Horns, properly selected for the application and room, sound great.  The ones I like, however, are too big for my room.  I can get them to fit, but I only have one room in my house that I can use for whatever I want, and I do other things in there besides listen to music.  I play guitar and piano, have friends over to jam, watch TV, and have a home studio for my full time job as a graphic designer/Illustrator.  If I had another room at my disposal, and it was big enough, I might go back to my KB-WOs.

Pbrain wrote: "A couple years back, I had the fortunate opportunity to take part in a double-blind mono test between a Revel Salon2 (very high-end, 6-way, traditional dome-tweeter design) and JBL M2 ("master reference" horn-based 2-way design) speaker."

I recall reading about that test on another forum.  Very interesting!

This was a "mono" test, I hadn't caught that detail before... single speaker vs single speaker?  If so, I assume the speaker being evaluated was at one end of the room, a little ways in front of the wall, and in front of what would be the midpoint of that wall.  Is this correct?

"Post analysis showed that I preferred the Revel on every sample, and to my ears during the test, it was obvious which speaker was which. I just couldn't warm to that up-front, in-your-face shoutiness of what is admittedly maybe one of the best and accurate horns designs of all time."

I assume there was no audible "horn coloration" from the M2, just a more "in your face shoutiness" to the presentation, at least in comparison to the Revel.  Is that correct?  

You see, I suspect two significant differences between the M2 and Revel were in play, in addition to (and in part arising from) their obvious physical difference (horn vs cones & domes).

First, according to the measurements I've seen, the Revels have a more "continuously and gently downward-sloping" in-room response, while the M-2's sort of "plateau" off-axis from 1 kHz to 10 kHz, which would give it a more "forward" or "in your face" presentation. 

Second, again according to the measurements I've seen (and implied by their respective configurations), the Revels have a wider radiation pattern, which, while not quite as uniform as the M2s, is still very good.   This results in more spectrally-correct late-onset reverberant energy, which is beneficial to timbre and a sense of depth (less "in your face-ness") and immersion.  In general, a well-energized, spectrally-correct reverberant field tends to sound rich and relaxing. 

Now I wasn't there of course, so this is just supposition on my part - but does any of this seem consistent with what you heard?

Duke

audiokinesis1,954 posts05-25-2019 9:57pm

>>>>>>>>Sorry for the long post, audiokinesis, but here's a few thoughts on your question.

(For some reason, I can't seem to figure out how to selectively quote previous posts or sub-post to them. Is that not possible here? The " button doesn't seem to do anything useful, but it's probably just my incompetence...)<<<<<<<<<

Pbrain wrote: "A couple years back, I had the fortunate opportunity to take part in a double-blind mono test between a Revel Salon2 (very high-end, 6-way, traditional dome-tweeter design) and JBL M2 ("master reference" horn-based 2-way design) speaker."
I recall reading about that test on another forum. Very interesting!
This was a "mono" test, I hadn't caught that detail before... single speaker vs single speaker? If so, I assume the speaker being evaluated was at one end of the room, a little ways in front of the wall, and in front of what would be the midpoint of that wall. Is this correct?

>>>>>>>Yeah. Dead center and about 6' from the front wall. The speakers were on a greased skid, so they could be positioned quickly an accurately at the same point for each test run. According to Dr Toole, speakers show their deficiencies much more in mono than in stereo, and a good mono speaker generally makes a good stereo one. All that's fortunate, because the logistics of testing in stereo are daunting.<<<<<<<<<<<

"Post analysis showed that I preferred the Revel on every sample, and to my ears during the test, it was obvious which speaker was which. I just couldn't warm to that up-front, in-your-face shoutiness of what is admittedly maybe one of the best and accurate horns designs of all time."
I assume there was no audible "horn coloration" from the M2, just a more "in your face shoutiness" to the presentation, at least in comparison to the Revel. Is that correct?  

>>>>>>>I don't remember gross colorations from either speaker. For obvious reasons with a dozen testees (yeah, I said it...) we couldn't spend much time with each of the 10 audio samples. Colorations not immediately obvious could have come up over time, but it's to Harmon's great credit that there weren't obvious ones.
If you consider stridency/edginess a coloration, then I did hear that on the M2 on a couple of the audio samples with a lot of high-frequency energy. I found the sample from Jackson's Thriller almost unlistenable on the M2. Again, that's probably just due to my particular set of head holes<<<<<<<

You see, I suspect two significant differences between the M2 and Revel were in play, in addition to (and in part arising from) their obvious physical difference (horn vs cones & domes).
First, according to the measurements I've seen, the Revels have a more "continuously and gently downward-sloping" in-room response, while the M-2's sort of "plateau" off-axis from 1 kHz to 10 kHz, which would give it a more "forward" or "in your face" presentation.
Second, again according to the measurements I've seen (and implied by their respective configurations), the Revels have a wider radiation pattern, which, while not quite as uniform as the M2s, is still very good.   This results in more spectrally-correct late-onset reverberant energy, which is beneficial to timbre and a sense of depth (less "in your face-ness") and immersion. In general, a well-energized, spectrally-correct reverberant field tends to sound rich and relaxing.
Now I wasn't there of course, so this is just supposition on my part - but does any of this seem consistent with what you heard?
Duke

>>>>>>>>>I can't really comment much on any measured in-room response on the Revel. All I can say is, that the anechoic response on both speakers is about as flat as I've ever seen in 60 years of fiddling with audio. John's room isn't particularly large or live, and we were seated only about 8' away from the speaker under test, so we were just outside of a near-field situation. Room effects weren't egregious or even noticeable above Schroeder.
I think the in-your-face character of the M2 is mostly due to its higher directivity index across the audio band. That's not atypical of horns in general.  In my experience in dealing with feedback in PA systems, you're gonna get a concentration of energy directly in front of a horn, even if specs say it disperses at 90 degrees.
We also can't forget that, in 2-way horn systems, the crossover's typically down so low that the horn's delivering almost all of the directional energy from the whole box. The M2's crossover is 800 Hz, so its horn is, from a directionality standpoint, just about the only thing you're hearing. That means that most of the M2's directional energy is essentially coming from one point in space--that compression driver down in the horn's mouth. It's no wonder it sometimes sounds like it's shouting! Directional energy delivery from the Salon2 above about 600 Hz is spread out vertically across 3 drivers, so there's just less energy density there. Also, the whole speaker system has a lower directivity index than the M2, so it disperses more widely horizontally. Like I said, we were seated right in front of these speakers and about 8' away. That's probably close enough for these spacial artifacts to make an audible difference.
Once again, I'm not saying that a horn's a bad idea, just that I like the way other treble drivers present music much better. It's just a preference. Because this test was done with some rigor, and because it compared a state-of-the-art representative of each technology, it really helped me to define the differences between dome-based and horn-based systems in what's left of my mind! If you can arrange even a casual comparo between two speakers like these, I highly encourage it. You'll learn a lot.<<<<<<<<<<<