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Well, be afraid to get what you wish people say and it is exactly what happens in this thread: last week I expressed curiosity about the tapped horns and today I have more information about them than I wished.  I appreciate John, Robert, Tom and others for sharing this thoughts and experience about the tapped horns. I print all of it out (I do not like read from screen) and carefully read it a few times. I would like to express my view on the subjects.

I know horn installations, I know what to do with them, I know drivers and I know how different design decisions impact results. In many instances I do not have experience with a particular design decision but my personal familiarity with similar design decision gives me an opportunity to a very high degree to predict the result that people get from unknown to me installations.  Being able in some cases to correlate my predictions with the actual afterwards listening I was always please how accurate my forecasts were. It is very far from ego statements but just recitation of the facts. What is important to understand is that in all cases of my experimentations, evaluation  or prediction there is my own personal experience and deep familiarity how my own listening awareness reacts to the given design decisions or the associative  design decisions.

In case of the tapped horns I feel very different as I have absolutely no, even associative experience how this type of the solution my sound subjectively. Therefore, reading the observation to others I have no tangible feeling behind them using words. I have no doubts that tapped horn would hit the SPL numbers and the LF equalization curve that were named but it hardly give me any idea about Sound or how it might sound. If someone knows any “interesting” installations with tapped horns in New England then let me know and I would not mind to familiarize myself. At this point I do not have any expectations or understanding about the tapped horns sound. Sure I understand how it works but it kind of reminds me something that I usually call the Iolanta Syndrome.  Iolanta was a Danish girl from Hertz’s “King Rene’s Daughter” (or Tchaikovsky’s opera with the same name)  who has been blind from birth and did not know about her blindness as no one in her father kingdom was allowed to talk with  Iolanta about light, colors and sight)…

Anyhow, from what I read so far I think my doubtfulness and my natural presumption of negativity (fewer disappointments) would be divided into two directions. What I do not like in the tapped horn idea is not the “tappedness" itself (something that I do not know yet if it is good or bad) but rather the horn “foldedness”.  John said: “The tapped horn suffers no more from resonances than a conventional folded front loaded horn.”  That is good but I hate the folded front loaded horns as I feel that the condom of resonance chamber in the wave pass impact sound too unforgivingly. So, would it be possible to separate the idea of “tapped horn” with the idea of “folder horns”. How about to have straight “tapped horn”? We are taking about the long horn but look at the mouth of the John’s tapped horn. In the long horns the destructive part is a huge moth but if we have no big mouth then we have virtually a long narrow pipe…

OK, let me to share with you the visualization that I have.  Would you fill that THIS idea of the use of the straight tapped horn makes sense for you? The idea is to have a long and narrow pipe, perhaps suspended above the main speakers and running across the whole presentation filed. The pipe is divided internally into two separate independent sections: one runs right and another run left channel. I did not think yet how it might be implement but if the tapped horn do sound OK then I think what I propose might a VERY cool solution to have a straight tapped horn with very low frequency (the bigger room the longer pipe), with practically no valuable footprint?

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