Horns: Why don't they image well?

@d2girls asked: "what horns will be in room 3002?"

One of mine, a new model making its debut. It’s called the Azel Stand Mount, and it’s not up on my website yet.

12" midwoofer, 1" throat Beryllium-diaphragm compression driver on a 15" SEOS waveguide-style horn. Rear-firing tweeter compensates for a radiation pattern mis-match between midwoofer and horn by fixing the spectral balance of the reverberant field. Crossover is kinda neat in a kinda nerdy way... starts out first-order and then accelerates to fourth-order.  Two pluggable ports to work with different boundary reinforcement situations, and user-adjustable treble-tilt via a high-quality external resistor. 

@gawdbless asked: "hey Duke can you please confirm what speaker/s you will have in the 3002?"

The entire system also includes the new "SuperStands" (so named because there just isn’t enough hyperbole in high-end audio these days). The SuperStands incorporate a built-in subwoofer and an adjustable coaxial driver dedicated to the reverberant field, the latter being an application of the "Late Ceiling Splash" and/or "Space Generator" concepts I’ve shown with a few times. The SuperStands will theoretically work with most stand-mount speakers.

Finally we’ll have two (optional) outboard subs positioned somewhere in the room, so that we’ll have four distributed subwoofer modules in total. Placement flexibility is not quite as good as with the Swarm because two of the subs are stuck doing double-duty as speaker stands, but we still expect to get pretty good modal smoothing.

"I hope to pop in, nay WILL pop in......."

SWEET!! Looking forward to it.

Didn’t you show a killer system with Mangers in a rounded upper cabinet once upon a time?

Duke

@duke,  Didn’t you show a killer system with Mangers in a rounded upper cabinet once upon a time?

Ooops, sorry gawdbless! My mistake. Must be getting old.

I miss my memories... I think.

Duke

@gawdbless and @d2girls, you might also want to check out Room 542, where Peter Noerbaek (of PBN) will be showing his M2!5’s... same horn and compression driver as the JBL M2, but TWO of the M2’s woofers, if I understand correctly. My guess is that speaker will do a LOT of things very well. Assuming I get a chance to sneak away at some point, probably Sunday morning, THAT’s the room I’m heading for.

Also I plan to hit the Classic Audio Reproductions room, a perennial favorite of mine, another big and actually beautiful horn speaker with amazing field-coil drivers. 

D2girls, you’ve got JBL 4367’s, right? So you are done with speaker shopping. But if you don’t mind, I’d love to get your brutally honest opinion of how my system compares.

And in my comments above where I was talking about reflections in horns, I forgot about this latest generation of JBL horns. I think their unusual internal geometry is specifically aimed at making sure internal reflections are directed away from the listener, and I bet they do an excellent job of it.

Duke