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fiogf49gjkf0d  Romy the Cat wrote: | | I very much do not want to sound like I am expressing sarcasm. |
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Romy, I don’t treat your comments like expressed sarcasm and I never did it. In my view, your site is the only place in Internet, where fruitful discussions are possible to exist in context of advanced audio practice/theory. Even when somebody expresses sarcasm – it’s not a problem for me, because I have only audio interests, so I keep my personality and the personality of the other posters far away from the discussions (sorry for the off topic).
| Romy the Cat wrote: | | I well know that you and others you trying to experiment with horns installations or at least are trying to think that they do are in a way the continuation of my efforts. There is nothing wrong with it if you have honesty in what you do and able to recognize of result without ego evolved. |
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I have absolutely no problem to confess I was motivated by your posts to perform some experiments with horns, because I read about the sonic benefits you have, but I haven’t heard these benefits coming from industrial horn loaded systems. So, driven by my never ending curiosity, I needed to check and hear for myself if what you describe happens in reality, thus I made some experiments in order to judge if what I hear could possible satisfy my requirements in terms of reproduced sound.
| Romy the Cat wrote: | | However, what I was caring about my MF I did not care about the lower range but only about the actual MF band path. It looks like you with your strategic orientation to “wider-rangeness” care about your MF in context of the lower octave you can get from the horn. I have very different approach. It is like building an amp – you need to ask yourself what will be limiting the bandwidth: gain stage, filter, transformer etc…I prefer it to be my explicit filter. In a channel of acoustic system I prefer the same, not horn profile or driver roll off shall be filtration factor by my filter as filter will decay with know to me phases characteristic. |
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Actually I use the same methods, with the only difference I want the driver to have trouble-free performance even far outside its operational range, because the out-band problems indirectly affect the quality of the usable bandwidth, after the electrical filter has been applied.
| Romy the Cat wrote: | | A few years back you were a strong proponent of single-drive speaker |
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This is simply not true. I used (and still use) very wide-midrange drivers, but they are supported with other channels. I have always said single driver speakers are a bad audio joke, especially the small-sized ones. IMO, even a high quality 12” wide range driver needs support by at least 3 additional channels…
| Romy the Cat wrote: | | Nowadays you look like accepted horn topology and claim advanced practice with elliptic contour. You might or might not have any practical background behind of what you say. It is internet and everyone can say anything. Post the configuration of your elliptic installation, explain reason behind it and demonstrate your ability to answer question. That, my friend, is not just internet blabbering but the actual knowledge sharing. |
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Yes, the oval mouth of the MF horn has more complex tone and also lessens the so called “call attention to itself” effect, but I did not accept horn topology, because of the following main reasons:
The channel that “pulls” the sound of the other channels must have as high as possible energy/ surface area ratio. There is no single horn which fits to that requirement, because there is no practical way to avoid the effect of “empty sound” that is coming from the horn. This happens because there is too low energy for a given mouth area. The situation doesn’t improve even with compression drivers having bigger diaphragms, because they require way too big throat, so in this situation the acoustic coupler can no longer be called a horn, because it will resemble a waveguide (having very little acoustic gain at the bottom knee).
The horns, even the fast opening ones are physically too deep for their mouth’s size, and this leads to a psychoacoustic illusion that the sound images are arrested at the bottom of the horn and from there they scream they want to escape, but the listener does not hear them - he hears their echo jumping out of the horn. This is the most important reason not to use horns.
Very unsatisfactory level of tonal discrimination. There are two reasons having negative impact on tone. The first reason is the horn itself. The sound of the compression driver accepts the inherent sound characteristics of the horn’s material. These specific sound characteristics affect any single note that passes through the horn in exactly the same way, effectively homogenizing the variety of original colors that are contained in the recordings. It is the same as wearing sunglasses. You can see part of the original colors of the objects around you, but you always see the added “color” of the glasses. The second reason is the compression driver. For tonally rich midrange and upper midrange, the diaphragm must be at least 5-6”. But if it is so big – then the sound of the upper range goes into the toilet, that’s why nobody uses big sized domes. I will not mention the big voice coils as a reason for bad tonal discrimination, because there is a way to construct compression driver with relatively small, tone capable voice coils (sacrificing few dB of efficiency). So it is downside of the specific implementation, not the topology. The same is valid for the material of its diaphragm.
But since I’m able to appreciate the pros of any topology, I have to note one very positive characteristic of the MF horns. Their big surface makes the sound very intelligible and the listener can clearly hear the subtle changes of sound “curves” and all this leads to better perception and understanding of the reproduced music within the limits of the usable frequency range. The reason why this doesn’t happen with the ordinary direct MF radiators is the absence of big surface area, no matter how well the driver reproduces low level information. From psychoacoustic point of view – the brain of the listener perceives the sound much easier, when the source of the sound is big enough. The lack of intelligibility of a small sized source cannot be compensated by anything, even high SPLs! But this is not enough stimulation for me to actually implement horns in my system. The same is with video: you can't see wha's in the picture, until you see it at big screen. Looking it at small screen at short distance doesn't help to see it.
So if there is horn/CD combo that is free from the above mentioned shortcomings – I will immediately buy it and use it! I have tried other topologies for MF reproduction that I also do not find usable, not only horns (electrostatic speakers, planars) because they have even more sound compromises. After all, if a big pile of shits in the middle of my room is able to reproduce the recordings better than anything else that exists on this planet – I will listen to it with a big pleasure :-))
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." -A.E.
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