To horn or not to horn

Let’s assume you find two pairs of speakers you like enough to buy, one pair horns.

Horn’s high efficiency sets you up for SUCCESSFUL lower power needs. That saves money, and the amp size/weight goes down, thus location flexibility increases.

High efficiency, horns or not, are always my recommendation to allow an easier entry into tubes, when lower power size truly saves money, size, weight, heat output.

Generally, if horns, the midrange horn size usually leads to a bigger woofer, thus less need for a subwoofer. That protects bass imaging, so, that could be considered a related advantage of horns. Of course, larger enclosures only work in certain spaces, and want to be out away from rear and side walls. I go for heavy enclosure on 3 wheels (3 wheels always wobble free and more pounds per wheel), push back for more circulation space, pull out for dedicated listening.

Horns can be as smooth and transparent as any speaker made. Like any other kind of speaker technology there are bad examples and excellent examples as Duke pointed out earlier.


Horns don't have to be all that big. For example you can have a quarter wave rear loaded horn in a small floor standing cabinet, that can go down to 50-60Hz. At that point its easy to set up a subwoofer system (keeping it below the critical-to-human-hearing 80Hz), which is not a bad idea anyway if you don't like standing waves messing with the bass at the listening chair. One of the best distributed bass array systems is the Swarm made by Audiokinesis; if set up with a quarter wave horn as I just mentioned, you can have a compact and efficient system without sacrifice of sound quality compared to much larger systems.

I like the good ones. 

As others have suggested not all horns are created equal. However, I dislike a higher percentage of horn designs than any other speaker type. 

Heresy IIIs and a couple of REL subs does the trick for me. And my single ended tube amp has only 4 tubes so tube rolling is inexpensive (and fun, my preamp has 4 matching tubes but not expensive). Note that before I started looking around for efficient speakers to match my amp, I hadn't listened to any Klipsch speakers for years...I found that the Heresy IIIs had none if the drawbacks that horn critics famously have issues with, and each is a coherent and revealing little powerhouse even with less power. 99db efficient...yeah man...