GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Basic guide to advanced audio

Post Subject: Back to the UBHPosted by Jorge on: 8/3/2011

I guess you cannot say you listened to a horn system if you dont have an upper bass horn.

The upper bass horn has to fill in the response from the compression driver down. At this delicate range nothing will perfectly macth it but another front horn. Nothing comes close to the resolution, cleanness and transparency of a good compression driver. The first problem is that they have such a low distortion that it is very easy to play them excessively loud; you won’t even realize it until your ears start bleeding. If it had a matching bass output under it you would be bringing the house down. I guess that is why they get such a bad reputation, but it would be like blaming an F1 race car for our inability to drive it. Once you have an Upper Bass Horn working properly with a good driver inside it, and getting at least 6 db extra output out of the loading (I just wrote about 2 pages of technical difficulties on this but let’s just stick to the sound) what could be a mediocre driver in a box or a board will explode with dynamics and low distortion inside an UBH: then you can match it with your compression driver and pass judgment on it.

Integration of sound between the compression driver and the UBH is wonderful, time alignment will clear the sound even further. You will notice no steps or borders when crossing from one horn to the other, both volumes will be easily adjusted and you will notice very low distortion in the sound, just crisp, transparent, dynamic sound on a longer very listenable range, the tone of the drivers will be evident and nice color shifts are possible with certain tricks, amplifier selection cabling, volume, Xover frequencies, and going further changing horn geometrical parameters change tone and texture too.

You can listen to just the two horns by themselves and it will be almost a pity to try to add a woofer under them, or a tweeter on top of it. Adding more channels do bring in a fuller response, and better tonal qualities, but beware, if it is not perfectly time aligned it will smear the sound of the two horns immediately and will do more damage than good, highs will sound hissy and distorted and you can easily hear when you slide the tweeter just a 1/8^th of an inch in the right direction, the difference it makes in the sound. Adding bass under it is a big problem; you will need very clean drivers and a lot of them, or a very big horn for mid bass. But when you have a full horn system sounding properly…well all this thread is about how it sounds and how far it will take you.

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