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if horn loading has any advantages in sound quality at all over direct radiator, where do you feel is the highest it can start ? 70? 100? 150? 300? .....
do you feel midbass horn systems can be successfully augmented by direct radiator, BP and PPSL subwoofers and keep overall system bulk far shy of those using basshorns?
Karlson Evangelist
Follow Ups:
YMMV but this is my findings. Horns match best with horns.
Hi guys,
What I've found over the years is for those of us who can't\don't want very larg systems An 800hz crossover point to a good quality 1.4-2" horn makes a world of difference. The detail, dynamics and transient attack are excellent But still livable over a wide range of music types. I've tried drivers down to 400hz and could dial them in on one type of music but others just drove me out of the room. YMMV but it the
opportunity arises for such a system give it a try.
A 15" two way with 800hz crossover is still gonna cost about $2K with good new parts. Much less if luckily found used parts are sourced.
Those with unlimited budgets may just want to go with a Danely system OR one that uses the JBL cone compression drivers and be done with it.
JBL cone compression driver- is that the CMCD?
How do they sound? Doing some searching it looks like people are using them 300-2k
I don't know how they sound. They look like one of the few options in that range. It's hard to imagine them sounding bad. If a pair of JBL srx738s came up in the north east I'd give them serious consideration.
This may help?
http://www.guitarbuilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Instrument-Sound-EQ-Chart.pdf
Freddyi, horn loading is optimally applied over the entire bandwidth. I am not ready to trade in my 15 Hz. flare constant horn sub for anything else after all these years. Once accustomed, why would anyone accept higher harmonic content? Sure the thing is a beast, but then we need to maintain standards, right?
Today I was tuning a piano at a performing arts center, and they were evidently sweeping the subs in the hall next door through a heavy concrete wall for a Norteno concert this evening. The harmonic content was obvious, not good, and quite unwelcome. Yuck!
I know - but not everyone has space for a full horn system - as a compromise I might use two little Karlson augmented by tapped offset driver pipe sub - a better 10" or K-tube on top - maybe inside the front chamber
Karlson Evangelist
Edits: 10/16/15
I mean the tall one....is that your Karlflex you were posting about previously? is the photo with a 12" or 10".. how low and high does it go?
Very cool stuff!!!
FM
designed by Diyaudio's TB46 (Oliver) for a 50 buck Infinity 1260W
and expertly built by Triticum Audio (Jesse Brunner)
it has beautiful lock- miter joints at its corners.
The plan calls for a round aperture but I wanted the pseudo K
aperture for aesthetics. The aperture edges are radiused - it can chuff a bit
with sine but suffices for music
Response
Plan
the "Karlflex" is Diyaudio's Matthew Morgan J's baby
and in its beginning incarnation has such a small front chamber
that there's no conventional K-aperture - just the opening
shown as "E" in the image below. It features a 1/4 wave harmonic smoothing
stub which also functions as part of the front chamber's volume.
The idea for a smoothing stub as I first saw it was from Ken Lehman who had a very long Nautilus tapered stub. I assumed a simple rectangular chamber would work. I think bandpass sims might get one into the ballpark but Matthew wrote an intense Akabak script which also includes a third/optionlal parasitic chamber - something like a parallel 6th order bandpass box.
Karlson Evangelist
Edits: 10/17/15 10/17/15 10/17/15 10/17/15 10/17/15
Hi Freddyi
Horns do two things (at least), they can increase the overall efficiency which means for a given spl, the radiator excursion is less and since the motor non linearity is a primary source of distortion, it is less as well. Second they can confine the radiation pattern which means at the listening position, one is receiving more direct sound and less reflected / late sound which helps articulation and or intelligibility as measured via STIpa.
There are two problems with horns (at least), they are limited bandwidth devices and because they are large, a multi-way system places the upper and lower sources farther apart which is a larger distance than with direct radiators.
Two loudspeakers or acoustic sources CAN add together coherently like two close coupled subwoofers do but only if they are about ¼ wavelength or less apart, beyond that the sources radiate independently and produce an interference pattern (a series of lobes and nulls in the polar pattern) and each source has it's own individual arrival in time depending on the distances which harms musical articulation and measured intelligibility as predicted with STIpa.
The latter is why large concert style line sources become unintelligible or less intelligible even when operated outdoors or when modeled acoustically even if each source were text book perfect, time does matter for some things like intelligibility and articulation generally but not for all kinds of music.
Also, the familiar thumb rule of a mouth 1wl in circumference is not actually correct or rather not understood, that is the dimension where increasing mouth size offers little extra gain as it implies the knee in the radiation resistance curve. Horn gain does start at a much smaller dimension, for example an SH-50 has a cabinet / mouth that is 28 inches square but the gain over the direct radiating drivers begins at about 100Hz.
Hope that helps, what do you want to do?
Best
Tom
hi Tom - - out of curiosity I'd like to revisit a midbass horn and for use in a small cramped space, try to augment the bottom with simple small sub - result might be frustrating and bulk large to reach 80Hz solid - think it can be done with small K-coupler as midbass rather than horn.
Best,
Freddy
Karlson Evangelist
I know it will mark me as an apostate heathen to many in this asylum, but the problem of the great physical distance between the drivers in the various horns can be easily corrected by a good DSP. My three way horn loaded system has over 16 feet of separation between the acoustic centers of the 15" woofers in the Fitzmaurice HT Tuba folded corner horn subs and the AER drivers in the Oris 150 wide range horns. Using a DEQX HDP-3 DSP I can correct that so that arrival times for sound from the two are equivalent to having the acoustic centers of the drivers within less than 1/8 inch of each other.
> if horn loading has any advantages in sound quality at all over direct radiator, where do you feel is the highest it can start ?
At the lowest frequency that you listen to.
Hi Bill, would you like to expand why? Thanks
The greatest demands on a speaker system are at the lowest frequencies. That's where horns offer the greatest potential for high output and low distortion for the least investment. The downside is that bass horns are of necessity large. Make your compromises where you must, they will always exist.
I remember spending time with Klipsch Pro's Chief Engineer, Roy Delgado. He said that tweeters have the least diaphragm movement, therefore, the least amount of IM distortion. So to paraphrase his further comment:
Woofer and subwoofers have the MOST cone movement and produce the most distortion and have the greatest benefit from horn loading.....usually 15-30 db less distortion, depending.........so it only makes sense to horn load the bass FIRST.
Yet, in practice, it's the last place people use a horn. So all non-horn bass is "compromised" for sure in some fashion.
Size matter.
For under 90 or 100 hz do you think the benefits of horn loading with a folded or tapped horn outweigh the drawbacks?
> For under 90 or 100 hz do you think the benefits of horn loading with a folded or tapped horn outweigh the drawbacks?
If I didn't I wouldn't use one.
Mr. Fitzmaurice is right: all the distortion generated by the lowest frequency horn is audible - first, second, third ...tenth harmonics all convolve themselves into modulation distortion products (see pgs 7-8 of the link below to the Nelson Pass article on the subject), especially with any sort of direct radiators since they in particular suffer between 15-25 dB higher modulation distortion, especially the higher order products which the human hearing system (ears+brain) hears most clearly without masking effects. With bass frequencies - all the generated higher order harmonics are audible, unlike tweeters or even midranges, where at some frequency, the higher order distortion products become inaudible. And the bass frequencies are at much higher amplitudes than midrange or tweeters - (i.e., 1/f power characteristic of music).
PPSL and other direct radiating designs all suffer from the effects of moving mass and nonlinear motor/compliance suspension that horn-loaded bass bins don't. This is especially true when playing back transients or even average SPL anywhere approaching actual concert levels...or even 10-20 dB below those levels...even for acoustic (i.e., non-amplified) instrumentation.
Direct radiator cones must move at least 5x further to produce the same acoustic power as compared to those same drivers used horn-loaded. That horn loading advantage never goes away.
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
"PPSL and other direct radiating designs all suffer from the effects of moving mass and nonlinear motor/compliance suspension that horn-loaded bass bins don't. This is especially true when playing back transients or even average SPL anywhere approaching actual concert levels...or even 10-20 dB below those levels...even for acoustic (i.e., non-amplified) instrumentation. "
You talk a good game, but why does a dual 15 PPSL go lower than a Klipschorn, have less distortion than a Klipschorn, and is more efficient than a Klipschorn?
(same amplifier, same room, the dual 15 PPSL has to be crossed out at 200hz~250hz).
"You talk a good game, but why does a dual 15 PPSL go lower than a Klipschorn, have less distortion than a Klipschorn, and is more efficient than a Klipschorn?...(same amplifier, same room, the dual 15 PPSL has to be crossed out at 200hz~250hz)."
Dennis, I have a lot of respect for your opinions both here and on the K-forum, and in terms of your PPSL and your electronics knowledge.
However, the point is obfuscated in "have less distortion". What kind of distortion are you measuring? Dual-tone modulation distortion with the drivers used as direct radiators and the same drivers used in a FLH? Harmonic distortion is approximately the same whether using direct radiating drivers or FLH at equivalent cone displacement travel, but modulation distortion (non-harmonic) piles up at the highest frequencies as sidebands on the direct radiating configuration and just sounds opaque with that "DR sound". I also feel that you know this to be true, but you must assume that it doesn't matter. For me, it makes all the difference in the world.
Use those same two 15" woofers in a well-designed FLH, and do the dual tone tests at equivalent acoustic output power. The FLH configuration will have a great deal less cone travel for the same output power.
Let's compare apples-to-apples, and not some arbitrary design to another, and different, arbitrary design.
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
Sure. Horns rule. But the ppsl device can not be grouped in with
"typical direct radiators"
Night and day difference.
Unless built to military tank standards, wooden horns (esp folded)
will always impart a huge colouration factor compared to a properly built
ppsl. They will also play deeper for a given footprint. Also, the bigger the (mid)/or bass horn, the larger the room requirements for a proper blend.
Recent listening experiments yielded the fact that my ppsl mid bass is much cleaner than a LaScala mid bass.
A ppsl device for the lowest frequencies is a fine compromise if you wish to call it a compromise. I call it a very wise solution.
To each their own & happy listening to all :)
what you said probably holds true for front loaded horns with well chosen compromises which have not cheated too much in size vs path and cutoff.I would think a poor or overly compromised horn/driver combo to possibly be as poor or worse than a well chosen direct radiator in the region of the direct radiator's tuning frequency. (?) 6th order tuning and boost could be used in the PPSL to milk some extension.
Here's a JBL double 15 4648 box at 100 watts - H3 at ~1/2 octave above tuning has risen to ~ - 30dB - what horns might one build in 10.2 cubic foot overall bulk limitation to outperform this box? (my FH1 is about this size)
here's the effect of a cheap weak motor Beta15cx speaker in the old spec Karlson vs the same speaker in a reflex the size of the Karlson's rear chamber with reflex tuning around 50Hz - I'm not positive how far this would hold up on a scale say descending from 100Hz on the lower note to 40Hz but have noted cone motion reduction on the Karlson to ~37Hz - either a fluke or something can happen below tuning not indicated with simple bandpass box predictions. Unfortunately a regular Karlson 15 is pretty much limited to around 50Hz practical with the rear chamber and system tuning dominating response.I have K-horn, Heresy I and Peavey's FH1 so am familiar with Klipsch from that standpoint.
Here's at the time a brand new UCS1 vs a homemade 225l (overall bulk) Karlson at 20v/50Hz loaded with a buyout Eminence 18" - the horn was 20dB worse at this frequency.
Perhaps there was shipping damage to the woofer?
Karlson Evangelist
Edits: 10/16/15 10/16/15 10/16/15 10/16/15
Why would you refer to extremely poor drivers on poorly designed horns vs. something that is clearly not anywhere near an apples-apples comparison?
Using a driver direct radiating vs. the same driver in a reasonably designed and built horn that matches that driver is a fair comparison.
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
The Nelson Pass piece is interesting, but where speakers are concerned this is more appropriate:
http://www.readresearch.co.uk/loudspeaker_papers/klipsch_modulation_distortion_article_1.pdf
I've posted a link to all three parts of that article below. I usually avoid using the PWK articles when talking to those that might like to argue about validity of sources due solely to the date that the article(s) were published.
More people nowadays seem to listen to NP, even though you might consider his arguments to be inapplicable to loudspeakers...I don't, however. YMMV.
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
I would like horns to start in the "hit box" range 80-125hz but that'd put another crossover point in the mid hundreds which is sensitive. An awesome sounding straight horn that covered 100-1000hz would be useful. There maybe one or two designs that would be good for home users but not many. Even fewer for pro-sound.
For now 1600hz is where I'm at but soon I'll have the driver to attempt an 800-900hz crossover range. I tried 400hz for a while but just couldn't get that to sound good over the wide range of music I listen to.
Mybe Wayen's 250hz horn to 1000 hz would be a good compromise.
Yes !
Fred, you are on to something here. Namely, a real nice way towards a
3 way. A 3-way ACTIVE (of course).
PPSL bass, mid bass horn 150-900ish, hi-frequency horn above. To add
a super tweeter or not is a matter of taste.
Now, the task would be to find drivers that will work for this.
Not easy, but NOT impossible. Probably $$$.
But, then again, fine music playback is not cheap.
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