@deep_333 wrote:
Who said i wasn’t a horn guy? i’m actually kind of a....hardcore horn guy. In fact, i have 3 of them, engineered to be finger licking good.....one was actually done by tad (no one knows about that), another one from tom danley and one from mike o’neill....Such horns came with immense cash savings too.
Would love to listen to those Pioneer horns at some point - I bet they’re great and that the engineering pedigree here is something to behold. You got Synergy horns also? I’m using a pair of DIY tapped horns - a Danley patent - and they have similar tuning and driver size compared to the TH50’s (~23Hz, which is a nice compromise in regards to the lower knee, upper extension, sensitivity (97dB’s) and size (20 cf.)).
I’m a horn guy as well, though I’ve been using horn-hybrid main speakers for over 5 years now (truncated all-horns 5 years prior to that). Using proper horn loading from the central bass to lower midrange is fantastic, but from my chair it requires of the horn to be non-truncated here for the best results (meaning: big size), and VERY few people do that. My Uccello all-horns (that I sold off some 5 years ago) had truncated bass horns, and it lead to colorations in the upper bass area while keeping them from hitting their full sensitivity potential as well (i.e.: ~101 vs. ~105dB’s).
Non-truncated front loaded horn subs from ~25Hz on up will be quite massive in size, which is why I opted for tapped horns vs. truncated FLH’s to wring out the most of that +25 lbs. 15" B&C woofer, essentially being a high order bandpass design taking advantage of both the front and back wave of the cone.
Only a fraction of audiophiles use a variation of a horn-loaded sub design, but what you pay for in size is rewarded with effortless, smooth bass reproduction that fills the room with low frequency pressurization in ways that is different to (and dare I say more natural than) both low and higher eff. direct radiating sub designs.
Back to the main speakers I recently converted from one horn-hybrid design (EV cinema speakers) to another, active one from Stage Accompany, and which uses a high sensitivity, horn-loaded 20 lbs. planar magnetic driver from 1kHz on up and a 24 lbs. 15" woofer/mid below (with built-in 2x300W class A/B amp channels connected directly to each driver, in addition to analogue active crossovers). "Hi-Fi PA" for sure, and that planar magnetic driver does things a compression driver or dome tweeter for that matter can’t replicate. Good stuff, and at a price level (while not cheap per se) that makes it all the more fun.
