I'm not saying measurements have much to do with personal taste. Some folks love the sound of horns, others huge baffle deals like DeVores and the big BBC clones. Some neither. These Focals I'm listening to at the moment have tweeters mounted in big lenses to manipulate their baffle interaction. The tweeters are called 1 inch inverted domes, but the actual diaphragm is much bigger than that and the main inverted dome is surrounded by smaller inverted domes. The mid-range driver is unusually large for the crossover point used and that leads to them being more directional at the crossover region. Line array theory would suggest that the 3 little woofers couple in their pass band and operate like a single 21" driver in the vertical plane. There seem to be all kinds of ways of manipulating the behavior of a speaker to mitigate or accentuate certain characteristics. I think a lot of modern speakers have improved a lot because more exotic ways of controlling driver behavior have been developed and better understood. I agree that a lot of speakers steal some horn theory and behavior. I also think they do it without the drawbacks and challenges of an actual horn. Is the KEF UniQ driver a horn? I've never heard it called one. I've never heard anybody say it sounds like one. But it does have a compression element and a waveguide. It's probably more of a horn that the tweeter arrangement Zu uses and lots of people call those horns.
Horn based loudspeakers why the controversy?
As just another way to build a loudspeaker system why such disputes in forums when horns are mentioned? They can solve many issues that plague standard designs but with all things have there own. So why such hate? As a loudspeaker designer I work with and can appreciate all transducer and loudspeaker types and I understand that we all have different needs budgets experiences tastes biases. But if you dare suggest horns so many have a problem with that suggestion..why?
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- 386 posts total
- 386 posts total

