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Paul S wrote:

Romy, no doubt the following derives wholly from my ignorance on the subject, but I have not been able to get away from a sense of "variable compression" with any compression horns I have tried.  By "variable compression" I mean that the compression effect is like a trombone that re-shapes notes according to frequency and volume and also sounds to me like a "trombone" with respect to dynamics, in a similar but not entirely parallel manner. A while back I heard and found very interesting a ridiculously priced pair of large TAD "Pro Monitors".  They were quite aggressive, but they sounded to me less trombone-like than other horns I remembered at the time.   But, now that you mention it, there was a fairly consistent sort of "pressure" about the sound that made it somewhat menacing, even with lighter music.  Still, better tonal accuracy than I had heard from horns before, and pretty good continuity, too. I have been keeping a weather eye out for horn talk I can relate to, and your mention of the TAD as "violently" compressing has me wondering how one avoids both the violent and the trombone-type compression. Obviously, I have not heard every compression horn...

Paul, what you refer to when you talk about the “trombone dynamics” has nothing to do with horns but rather with the greed and partially stupidity of the horn builders. A horn has lower pass-through frequency that determined but the size of mouth, let call it Fpass. A horn has a driver with it’s electrical high pass filter, let call it Fcut. The proximity between the Fpass and Fcut is very important – I call it the “Horn No Man Lend”. It would depending from the type of driver, crossover type, the given octave, type of horn and many other factor and might vary in some case to be more then a hole octave. What the stupid people do is disregard that “Horn No Man Lend” making the crossover point to close to the horn’s Fpass. It is perfectly understandable why they do it – to get more frequency out of minimum size but it unfortunately severely screw up sound, making the horn to choke with exercise LF. So, the very next time when you see a proper horn (not the Altec/JBL piece of crap) that from you point of view demonstrate the “trombone dynamics” try to increase the crossover point at this horn for a half of a third of octave. In 95% of all cases the “trombone dynamics” will be gone. There are some other reasons why the ““trombone dynamics” might take please but still there are way to deal with it.

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