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It is not surprising that the subject of horn is as screwed as the subject of drivers. It is understandable as driver must be made for specific horn loading, not one make drivers properly, so what the horns are made for?

A horn is a very simple devise but if you have money and desire to build or buy a horns for you playback then you will have a lot of problem to find where the sores them. Do not take me wrong. There are a couple dozens of custom horn makers in today words and there are perhaps a hundred of manufactures that in one way of or other use horn-loading in their playback. However, all of them do whatever is convenient for them to make not what is need to be done and not what you might would like to have (if you have a sense of identity regarding to what you want).

So, let have general overview about horns as we have it today.

The Pro-Audio. The horns and the horn-loading principles that pro-audio industry offers today are very much garbage and must be discarded for home use. The pro-audio solution might work in cases of furnishing sound for large spaces and high power but this is totally different universe of sinking and it used totally different certain to define success. I personally did not see any single pro-audio horn that was made or design up to the point what I would consider acceptable, trust me - neither did you.

The Vintage horns. There is a big array of all possible horns starting from 20s and ending with 60s what the ported designs begin to show up. I found ALL vintage horns very much not acceptable. I laugh what I wee people pay tens thousand dollars for old RCA or WE horns. The Klangfilm had not bad idea with their own MF profile but they never implement it in a way it needed to be done. We need to clearly understand that 70-50 year back there was no today’s demands for quality of sound and all vintage acoustic systems, if you experience then in this original form, sound very sloppy and very sub-demanding. As I always wrote, it requires a lot of understanding, sense and audio intelligence to make vintage playbacks to sound properly. Mostly audio people do not have it and if they do then the “horn” ingredient of the vintage systems is one of the first to go.

Today.  I would leave aside the commercially available complete horn systems for now as I will be make a next write up about them. In this section I would like to talk about the individual horns available for today horn user. Generally speaking the HF horn shall have faster opening and LF horn shall have slower opening. Of cause in my mind all horn mish be spherical.  There are many variables that might interact with this rule; I will not go over them here.

There are quite a few horn makers who would do custom 5kHz horn.  We might have a good selection of profiles, materials, finishers.  Germany, France, Australia, Russia, USA, Belgium juts atop of my head has a few makers who would be very accommodating and would do whatever you wish.

As soon we move to lover 250Hz-1000Hz horns then the satiation is change. It is more difficult to found makers for those horns. We still have 10-20 pleases where the things might be done but people mostly do not do what is necessary but have own set of cookie-cutters solution that they are willing to execute.  When we are at 250Hz-1000Hz range then the materials and the profile of the horn become matter. Materials are available: various plastics, various metals, various woods, various pressed armatured paper. All of the materials might work out well if they are sensibly done. As rule a customer has no chose in material as one maker uses only one type of manufacturing, and if you deal with a maker who does wood then you have a section of different type of woods but you would hardly be able to get out of this manufacture a metal horn. In this range there are 4 profiles available. First one is all slow opening profiles – I am not a big fun of it for this range, let live it alone. Second is Le Cleach profile that is better for HF knee with right driver but in my view the Le Cleach very controversial from a perspective of whole system design as it has very low real-estate per frequency compliance. The there is Tractrix. It has fast opening and low size but in my view needs a further revision of profile termination in the direction of Le Cleach does.  The last one is conical profile. This is also a divisive profile; there is only one manufacturer who insistently promotes it. I am familiar with the argument to support the conical profile, I degree with them. Even though I do have high respect to the manufacturer who promote the conical idea I have to admit that by very peculiar confidence any single conical profile user that I know is a fucking idiot. This fact itself discouraged me to look into the conical idea personally. The last but not least I have to note that with 5kHz horn we, the users, can do whatever we wish but with 250Hz-1000Hz horn we exposed very much to the manufacturer’s egos that not always in  compliance with our design intentions.

Moving to lover 80Hz-200Hz horns opens a gate to hell when it is practically imposable to get out of horn maker anything beside what they have done before. You will have a lot of difficulty to found makers who will LISTEN YOU and to comply with what you would like to have.  The implementation patters of 80Hz-200Hz horns are greatly depend of environment of a give system, so most of generalization will not work. The horn makers seldom agree with it and they try to promote themselves as they own some “secret” in horns making. Well, the best their secret is that their customer are Moron and it is about it.

The sub 70hz how are the beast on it’s own and it usually more a labor of love. The properly performing sub 70hz horn is very seldom, there are many badly performing surrogates but they just devaluate the concept and prove that any technology in hands of barbarian will produce a barbarian result.

That is about it regarding the horns. I would add that very few people are able to view horns in context of the drivers’ need and to recognize a driver and a horn as a homogenous unity.

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