[Freo-1]

How many of you who have low wattage setups use horns?  I’ve always thought horns have the potential to provide the most dynamics which emulate live music.  It’s always been a challenge to get them to provide a flat frequency response throughout the audio spectrum.
 
I did hear a pair of modified Klipschorns with 300B mono blocks that sounded really good.  I know the crossover was redone, but not sure if it had a updated tweeter. 
 
Looking for feedback from the group on this. 

[mboxler]

Original owner of a pair of '85 Klipschorns.  Replaced top-end with V-Trac's from Volti Audio, BMS 4592ND-MID's, and Selenium D220Ti's,  AK2 Crossover replaced with Universal kit from ALK Engineering. 

Yes...difficult to match a 104 dB woofer, a 118 dB mid, and a 109 dB tweeter, but love the sound!

Mike

[fredgarvin]

The Klipschorns I was using had the EV  T-35 tweeter, which I found way to aggressive. I wasn't really driving them with decent amplification though.

[macrojack]

I have horns and I like them, but I do not use low power amps presently.

I had custom made passive crossovers designed by measurement for my specific speakers and the graphs I saw would indicate very flat response. I have not measured them in my home, however. The tests that were done by the designer were performed outdoors. My speakers consist of a coaxial (tweeter and midrange) compression driver, large wooden horn, and 15 inch woofer in a ported 5 cu. ft. enclosure. I'm very pleased with the sound.

[Gothover]

I have had several sets of horn speakers driven with set amps... Love em.

Here is one of my favorites, before and after pic.

Ported Lascala Project - Link   http://forums.klipsch.com/forums/t/135733.aspx?PageIndex=1

Dave



Here is a shot of my scratch built Monaco

[Gothover]

Here is another restoration.

These KHorns sounded great as well. Powered by a 3w Decware.

Dave

[JoshK]

Currently building at least one horn system... details to be determined, but a browse through my gallery shows some of the toys to play with.

[Scott F.]

I've got a couple sets of horns, a pair of reboxed Altec A7s and a pair of reboxed Klipsch Cornwalls.


A raw pair of A7s can be a bit difficult to listen to unless you EQ them. They don't do much over 8k so they really need a super tweeter. The 511 horn with the 802D compression driver is a little peaky. In the Altec horn line, the Model 19s are the best sounding. They incorporated some notch filtering and level controls on the 811 horn. It can sound really darned good with fleapowered amps.



I've since disassembled these and am using the Altec 416s as the woofers in my OB Lowther system.



On the Klipsch side I've heard a number that can sound really good. Corner horns with fleapowered amps are really nice as are the Belles and LaScalas. Mine are a pair of reboxed Cornwalls.




I've upgraded the crossovers with the Crites XO. I also descreened the squawker and wrapped it with sound deadening material to eliminate the 'ring'. The two little tweaks really opened up the sound but.... I really need to do some more tweaking. In their current form, they will rip your face off if you play them too loud. I need to install either some pots or padding resistors on the squawker and tweeter to tone these down. I've also started playing with felt strategically sized and placed inside the mouth of the horn. This really makes quite a difference on the peaky parts of the response.

With some more time and experimentation, these could turn into some really fine sounding speakers. I can really hear the potential. Oh, and I love the bass of that old 15" Frazer woofer.

[nullspace]

I've been using horns for a while. I built a prototype for some new speakers last summer, and am working on the finished pair now. It's a straight-forward two-way with Great Plains Audio 414-8B AlNiCo 12" in a vented box plus Great Plains Audio 802-8G Series II AlNiCo 1" compression driver on an Acoustic Horn Co. AH!1000 50deg conical horn. The new boxes will be ~4.6cu ft tuned to ~27Hz.



I'm not much for making precise cuts in large sheet goods, so I built the box out of .75" by 1.5" poplar. Here's a representation of the construction method:



Regards,
John

[sts9fan]

Wow! Those boxes look awesome!  How long did they take to assemble?

[planet10]

Backloaded horn anyone? Typically powered with 3.9W RH84 variant.



dave

[eclein]

How about little horns, do they count...LOL      JBL-L830

[nullspace]

Wow! Those boxes look awesome!  How long did they take to assemble?

Thanks. I think it took me about two months last summer to put together one. Most of your time is spent watching glue dry -- literally. I built each layer individually around a fixture, then glued layer to layer working in small sections at a time. This way, if I made a mistake -- and I did -- I could just chuck out a small piece rather than having to start from square one. Also, working from a fixture like that helped ensure that everything lined up correctly.

I hope this summer to have two completely done, including finishing, by the end of July. I thought I had all the manufacturing kinks worked out, but I decided to slightly change the dimensions, and that has caused some issues I'm still working through.

Regards,
John

[bonejob]

How many of you who have low wattage setups use horns?  I’ve always thought horns have the potential to provide the most dynamics which emulate live music.  It’s always been a challenge to get them to provide a flat frequency response throughout the audio spectrum.
 
I did hear a pair of modified Klipschorns with 300B mono blocks that sounded really good.  I know the crossover was redone, but not sure if it had a updated tweeter. 
 
Looking for feedback from the group on this.

In general, I don't like horns. Yes, the dynamic range, even with - or especially with - low-wattage tube electronics is often VERY impressive. And it's hard to stake a position disputing one of the main pro-horn arguments put out there by "horn-o-philes" that live-like dynamic range is one of the most important - if not "THE" most important - ingredients to really involving music reproduction.

But then I have to listen to the speakers - in the real world. And despite horn-loaded loudspeakers' well-known virtues, they almost all add coloration - especially in the midrange - that sometimes just drives me out of the room. I've heard this coloration attributed to various factors, including internal reflections inside the horn, sympathetic vibrations in the horn itself, phase shifts and time alignment distortions generated by those self-same internal reflections, comb-filtering effects caused by frequency-dependent phase cancellations and reinforcements as the sound propagates through the horn; those are just the ones I can pull out of my hat.

Manufacturers of horn speakers have over the years mentioned how much R&D money they have spent to address these issues and they all say that they are no longer a significant problem - at least not in THEIR product line. But most of the time, I can tell I am listening to a horn, even blindfolded.

ONCE though... JUST ONCE... I heard a Klipschorn system that sounded AWESOME!  I don't know what the secret was. I suspect that it was at least partially that the proud owner's "great room" was HUGE - about 25' wide and 40'-50' long with vaulted ceiling about 10' high at its lowest, 20'+ at its highest. Being able to stand back may have enabled the sound field to blend better. Since then I have come to think most living rooms are too small for K-horns and you end up listening to them in a "near-field"-like environment. And, to be fair, many fine speakers out there just don't sound their best - or very good at all - in their near field.

The electronics may have been a factor. I don't know but I did note that they were unusual. His preamplifier was a Van Alstine-modified Dynaco PAS-3X tube unit - a very good choice by most accounts - certainly by mine. I was a little surprised he didn't have a more expensive Audio Research SP-3a or the like; he could certainly have afforded it.

His power amp though, really set me on my ear! He was using a solid state amp by - of all people - SANYO! Yes, THAT Sanyo - purveyor of cheap crap car stereos and the like. But during the late '70's to mid-'80's or so, Sanyo flirted with serious audio. This unit was 100 watts per channel, based on power MOSFETs - very bleeding-edge at the time. Additionally, the amp's topology was - I am reasonably sure - parallel push-pull (two MOSFET pairs per side), pure Class A. It was a dual-mono setup with two power transformers, and TWO pairs of hefty 10,000 μf filter capacitors! The pièce de résistance was freon liquid cooling!

Power MOSFETs' main virtue is their tube-like behavior. Low distortion at fractional wattage output with little or no negative feedback necessary; distortion products are more low-order even, less high-order odd; ability to handle high current; relatively flatter THD-vs-output curve; not susceptible to thermal runaway. All this, plus the solid state hallmark of high damping factor for solid, tighter bass. Also, tubes have a tendency to be microphonic, and this could have been an issue at the high sound pressure levels I was experiencing in this fellow's listening room.

All I know is that this particular setup, in this particular setting, was AWESOME!! Sorry... no other word says it as well. I kept having to reach down and pick my jaw up off the floor. The program material helped I am sure. I was listening to a recording of a live professional symphony orchestra performance of Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben" made just a couple of days prior on a half-track 15-ips 800-series Crown open reel with Dolby Type "A" noise reduction! Just for grins, he demoed the system with a couple of good Mercury Living Presence LP's on his Thorens/SME/Shure turntable setup, too. And that was somewhat less awesome, but pretty amazing in its own right; but pretty hard to compete with a well-made original 15 ips analog tape, even with the best of today's technology, IMO.

But I digress... The point is that I now know that it is at least POSSIBLE for a horn-loaded speaker system to be AWESOME! But I am still bothered that I haven't heard more horn-loaded systems that impressed me. I've been let down, underwhelmed, even cringed at, some very expensive systems built around horn-loaded speakers. And I've been blown away by ONE! What I take away from that is: it is difficult to the point of being impractical to show off horn-loaded speakers to favorable result in the vast majority of home environments. So I have to wonder why people are willing to spend so much money and put in so much effort in trying. I just don't understand this component of the audio hobby that can be so apparently ideology-driven. 

[Freo-1]

Thanks. I think it took me about two months last summer to put together one. Most of your time is spent watching glue dry -- literally. I built each layer individually around a fixture, then glued layer to layer working in small sections at a time. This way, if I made a mistake -- and I did -- I could just chuck out a small piece rather than having to start from square one. Also, working from a fixture like that helped ensure that everything lined up correctly.

I hope this summer to have two completely done, including finishing, by the end of July. I thought I had all the manufacturing kinks worked out, but I decided to slightly change the dimensions, and that has caused some issues I'm still working through.

Regards,
John

Very cool, John.
 
Let us know how you progress.  Love to read about DIY efforts like this.

[jerryleefish]

I have been involved with horn speakers since the '50s. I have researched and built them, K horns and University Deans. In the early days Paul Klipsch was my idol,over time I decided he had clay feet. I read a book by Abraham Cohen who was the brains behind University Sound. This led me to build a pair of corner horns. The design was good, difficult to build and with the exception of the C15W wolfer the components were poor. The problem with a three way system is the midrange horn. They exhibit the sonic signature of a PA system,which some of them were. By size limitation they must be crossed over around 350/400 hz. I found a 7" cone mid range in its own enclosure to be a better option. It can be crossed over at 250 hz. The other issue with a three way system is imbalance between the bass horn and the midrange/tweeter. Bass horns are efficient and they overpower the other speakers. To make them work the bass output must be lowered. This can be achieved by an attenuater in the wolfer circuit, or biamping.
If you wish to have horns most likely you must make them or buy used. Either approach is thorny. Used plans can be found for construction. Considerable time, skill and money are involved making a bass horn.
Speakers and crossovers must be obtained. 
I have seen horns offered on Ebay. They may come complete or just the housing. Complete the are quite expensive and due to size and weight shipping is an issue.
I built my horns over thirty years ago and I still enjoy them.

[cujobob]

Bonejob check out gedlee Abbeys, dynamics and detail galore without the harshness from a poorly designed horn or waveguide. High order modes cause the horn honk people think of, not necessarily the drivers. There are crossover workarounds but a bad waveguide is still a bad waveguide.

[audiomagnate]

I have JBL SVA 2000s and they don't sound "horny" at all. They sound dynamic and, well lovely.

[borism]

Love my AudioKinesis Jazz Modules! Dynamic and beautifully balanced.

[JoshK]

The Jazz Modules also look sexy in my personal opinion.   I like them more than many other bespoke "sexy" furniture grade speakers.  There is something very proportional to their dimensions.