Why not horns?

dc10audio is all horns!

Frogman, you are suffering from a bit of hero worship and unfortunately don't really know the real scenarios that played out. Neither do you know the sound there over those years, obviously.

Really? I don't think so; my heroes make music and sound not write about them. Here's what I do know: I can't remember a time that I bought a recording that he recommended, and then, when judging the sound of the recording on my system not being able to verify what he described. Operative word here is MUSIC. I am not aware of anyone else being so articulate and accurate (aargh!) in the way that he wrote about recorded music; and the passion with which he did so. That is good enough for me. Additionally, I can't think of a component that he spoke highly of and which I then owned (not many), or had extensive experience with, that I disagreed with his assessment of. The man has great ears.

Ralph, way wrong. There were great horns when Harry hated them.....Tannoys have been great for a long time, various JBLs were, horns were all over in recording studios sounding great.

Kiddman, I think you may have misunderstood my post. I happen to agree there were great horns when hp made that statement and one of my early customers was making Hartsfield reproductions which sounded great at the audio shows in the late 80s and early 90s. I was running Altecs with dual 15" woofers back in the 1970s... Anyway my point was with my last post that hp would certainly not say that today.

As far as contributions- hp created most of the vernacular we audiophiles use to describe the sound of our stereos- 'soundstage', the use of color descriptions to describe tonality ('bright', 'dark', etc.). He was one of the very first to describe the sound of equipment based on listening. Stereo Review and other magazines around at the time simply did not do that. Nowadays we take that sort of thing for granted. So his contributions should not be ignored even if you don't agree with his reviews. He had a serious influence on high end audio.

Given his influence, still sounds like horn designs were largely ignored by HP back in his day, and that may be one (not the only reason) that horn speakers do not get as much attention today (or over the years since their heyday) as they might deserve.

On the other hand, over the years, I have heard a lot more poor or mediocre sounding horn based systems than really good ones. Only in more recent years again it seems have a large variety of vendors seemed to endeavor hard to get the design right and also make them affordable and in a package whose size has appeal for more as well.

So the comment earlier that HP did a disservice to horns somehow seems to ring true to me, even if the error was merely one of omission, in that he was in search of TAS apparently so cost, size etc. should not have been a limit.

Did he ever review any Walsh style speakers set up well?

If not then I'll pin that disservice on the poor guy as well. :^)