opinions on modern horn speakers

After many years as a Maggie fan I haveswitched to Lowther Medallions PM2a and a 3.5 watt DH SET amp. I couldn't be happier!

Honky, I feel is true of older designs. The Avantgardes, and even better the A-Capellas are defentitely worthy of a try. Especially the latter, if set up right, can even give the best of stators a run for their money.

In Beuhorns I don't hear any honking but don't hear any bass and details as well. They're simply bass-free speakers.

Avantgarde is an active system with active dynamic(i.e. non-horn) woofer(well except Trio that has bass-horn that needs quite a space and costs like Mercedes 500 series). I listened to Uno and Solo and realy was impressed with fast woofer and horn integration. The horn in Avantgarde could be driven with OTL since its impedance goes quite high.

modern horn designs for most part sound o.k. with some types of music but they are unforgiving of all but the finest source components and source material....all in all a bit too restrictive for this old rock and roller,who finds that most of his favorite music needs to be forgiven a bit.

Acapella makes the only full-range (by using hybrid driver techniques) horn that sounds like a single-driver, has all the benefits of a horn speaker and none of the disadvantages (well, except perhaps size). These are the best general-purpose speakers made today (and they do rock-and-roll just fine :-) but like most speakers the better the upstream components are the happier you will be. While "high-quality" solidstate sounds quite good with them, on the bigger ones, with the higher efficiencies, a single-ended triode like an ML2 could be very well be the best pairing since... Rogers and Hammerstein, or Martin and Lewis, or.... the dynamic duo?

-Mike (Audio Federation, Acapella dealer, some time rock-and-roller)