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Given the cost and complexity of building a proper horn (no flames from Diy'ers, please), has anyone been working with modern manufacturing technology to drive the price down and the quality up?
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A 3d printer could make a perfect horn, any configuration that you want, and it could be honeycombed to any thickness, but, it would be very expensive, and require many hours of run time. We are making wooden petal horns per Bill Woods design, another option is to order Azura horns, they are great build quality, and a fair price. No matter what course you choose, horns are no fun to put together.
Nice post from a manufacturer, seriously. It's both informative and honest. It offers another alternative and still comes across as the truth.
More vendors should be so succinct and helpful.
I looked seriously into it and it is not the technology we need for horns.
How they work is with a plastic tubing that the printing head melts and places a little drop into position, 3d of course. For the head to melt the tubing it has to be very small in diameter, and this also helps in having a better resolution. So what you can do is have a thin plastic shell of any size or shape you want. Yes I found big enough printers for a 120 hz horn, but it will be able to make a thin shell and it will take the machine a week to do it! Of course this will cost more than an Ongaku amp, and you will need two of them!
The texture is not that good either, so you will probably also need to finish them afetrwards.
If you want to go smaller you can make a crappy thin plastic horn, but there are already a lot of those in the market for a few bucks.
What we need for a horn is a solid thick material to make the walls of. It can be solid plastic, Teflon, MDF, wood, concrete? any dead sounding material.
If you make them out of Ceramic or metal you would actually be building a bell!
To 3D print a thick material would be so costly it is not an option.
Imho this technology doesnt really help that much right now.
You make some great points. However...
it's fairly easy to coat the base product with layers of other material. And, technology has a habit of making its way down the production cost ladder.
:)
Yes you can print a thin shell horn and like a Goto type horn add blobs of deadning material to the back.
You also have the problem, depending on the machine you use, that the finish is prety rough and ugly.
I guess the best option is still a 3D scan and have it CNC out of wood.
High sensitivity, wide dynamic range, low distortion, and smooth frequency response. Pwk
I have some rare prototype horns I wanted 3d scanned and printed but they said it was too big. They said perhaps in a couple years the machines will get bigger.
28 inches wide
10 inches high
11 inches deep
So perhaps in a few years the machines will get bigger.
High sensitivity, wide dynamic range, low distortion, and smooth frequency response. Pwk
I don't know what you consider a proper horn but looking at the Parts Express catalog and other sources it seems to me that good horns are already pretty cheap.
Parts Express has a ton of good horns for 1" exit drivers. I might want something more like a pure conical made from wood, but even this is not hard if it is not too big.
The problem is with big horns, with a cutoff below 1000hz.
Azura in Australia and others in Europe like Stereolab or Athos audio have a lot of good horns available. The problem is shipping. I don't know why someone in the US doesn't get on this. Seems like an obvious thing.
Shapeways, or a similar outfit could help you do it.
Have fun
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