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High Efficiency Speaker Asylum Need speakers that can rock with just one watt? You found da place. |
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In Reply to: Horns for Hi-Fi - what happened ? posted by J. Phelan on October 12, 2010 at 05:07:25:
Hi
Leaving hifi out of the discussion, essentially every market area that aims at discretionary spending is dominated by companies who have created the optimal image for their products. In that marketing construct, one essentially never finds the best performance correlating to the biggest seller.
The reason is it is well known that a dollar spent creating the image of R&D and technology brings in more sales than a dollar spent on R&D and technology.
What is “popular” in the home has as much to do with marketing and manufacturing as what works. In reality, the problems are fairly clear.
A hifi reviewer I knew once said “there are some speakers that sound real good and there are some that can go pretty loud but none do both well”.
Basically, most loudspeaker flaws increase faster than the level does so that as the level increases, the flaws become louder faster than the signal. That is why one can make an inexpensive single driver headphone speaker but producing good sound at 15 feet is out of the question for that driver , let alone for dozens to tens of thousands of people.
If you look at what is used in larger spaces when the maximum fidelity is required and cost not a concern, you will see horns are alive and well. While innovation is largely stagnant in the home loudspeaker area, if you investigate commercial sound, you will see innovation and horns are alive and well. Essentially all of the full range systems I design for work are full range horns.
You mention size, this is a key problem for horns in the home.
Many are used to the idea that one can make “good sound” from speakers the size of a sugar cube and that in order to work, speaker have to look the part. Horns on the other hand, don’t care about marketing fashion, they are only concerned with the acoustic size relative to the wavelength involved.
On the other hand, the directivity horns can produce greatly reduces the room effects, improving the stereo image, while at a meter they generally do not measure as flat as a good cone and done system, the directivity can allow them to produce a much better response curve AT the listening position than the same cone / dome system.
You mention ESS speakers, if large these can produce directivity also and this can reduce the room effect, also leading to a better stereo image. I am not sure Quad and Janzen were connected though, there was a company called RTR that made the same panels that Janzen used. I had built a number of loudspeakers using these panels (some were about 6 inches square, and the others were half sized).
Also, in a perfect world, ESS speakers like a proper horn within it’s operating band, can reproduce the input waveshape, a square wave goes in, a square wave comes out. The vast majority of “hifi” speakers do not preserve time well enough to do that. So far as transparency, I had several types of ESS speakers including several home made sets but I could never go back, while they have some powerful strengths, they have weaknesses too.
You mention coloration too. If you consider coloration to extend past altering frequency response, then what gives a speaker it’s identity is in part due to time and re-radiation. If one has more than one source of sound operating in the enclosure then the interference pattern the sources produce is also part of the sound. To avoid that pattern of lobes and nulls, sources must be less than about ¼ wl apart. While it is difficult to follow that criteria with direct radiators, it is virtually impossible to resolve with separate horns because of their acoustic size. On the other hand, it is possible to have a horn system where no one would guess it was a horn or even more than one driver.
Best,
Tom Danley
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- RE: Horns for Hi-Fi - what happened ? - tomservo 07:43:53 10/12/10 (0)
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