I think they are an interesting science experiment.
I thought I found the ultimate horned bass-head, but apparently it is simply a piece of landscape art.View attachment 75849
In one of the old Audio Magazine anthologies, there was an article about a guy who built a horn into one whole wall of his house. The horn itself was external to the house with the mouth of the horn taking up one of his walls. Apparently he did this while his wife was on vacation, so there wasn't much she could do about it when she got back home. That was back in the mono days; who knows what he did when stereo came onto the scene.
Did the EONs arrive yet?
Recommendations?
I was kind of eyeing the Klipsch La Scala, or maybe even the Klipschorns.
You know ... that's just the inverse of exaggerated audiophool babble. Almost no horns sound "bloody horrific", and no horn I ever heard sounded like "scraping nails on a wall". Horns have significant strengths and weaknesses; some listeners like the strengths more than dislike the weaknesses. They're an extremely valid option.
Fully agree. If technical leaders in the field are to be believed, most of the alleged horn traits that people don’t like are down to sub optimal implementation. I’m an engineering layperson and got interested in this when thinking about trying a horn speaker. I ended up buying this and am slowly reading it cover to cover:
https://www.lean-business.co.uk/eshop/high-quality-horn-loudspeaker-systems-by-bjørn-kolbrek-and-thomas-dunker-p-3317.html
As a borderline ignoramus it seems to me that very few modern horn designers would be likely to have a comprehensive understanding of applied horn theory, unless they specialise in it academically or have access to the sort of technical repository that companies like Klipsch are likely to have. There are plainly smaller endeavours that treat this very seriously and publish the technical assumptions in the designs (such as pi speakers), but I’d assume they are few and far between. I suppose a challenge is one that exists with most speakers, being that the designer has no control over the environment that the speaker is used in, so who knows what listeners are hearing and why.
Amazing.More extreme Horn speakers, one in this thread:
https://www.audionirvana.org/forum/the-audio-vault/loudspeakers/135088-now-this-is-a-loudspeaker
Also would love to have heard this:
http://www.burwenaudio.com/Sound_System.html
Looking at systems like that makes me feel extraordinarily conservative in building mine, and I'm absolutely insane my most people's standards.