Vintage Asylum

Posted by Brian Levy (A) on February 21, 2015 at 16:17:35

In Reply to: RE: Vintage speakers. Alnico Ferrite so on. The good the bad and ugly. Experiences audiomind ;) posted by GSH on February 21, 2015 at 14:28:15

I disagree with your conclusion that the horns have exaggerations inferring they actually are not as capable of a higher dynamic range than a dynamic driver.

Do a little research and you will find any number of studies showing a horn system can easily have a substantially larger dynamic range than an equivalent dynamic driver system. While back in the late '50s and early '60s AR was proving an audience could not tell the difference between. Live orchestra and a recording of the same, they had to purposely chose music with little dynamic range because the AR could not produce half the range the orchestra had wanted to play. I worked for Teledyne, the owner of AR towards the end of their series of tests and had this discussion with the AR engineer. AR at the time had a set of Belles in their lab and in playing the hs recordings of the pieces not used he said the Klipsch could almost deliver both the spls and dynamic range of the orchestra on the pieces but the ARs could not come close and in fact were blowing their tweeters and mids in trying to do so. They the time, the company had a rack of McIntosh MC3500 mono tube amps.

I, am not necessarily keyed in on dynamics as my main speaker, the KLH Nines I ran for decades will attest and these almost never heard of something called dynamic range.
Don Brian Levy, J.D.
Toronto ON Canada