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Re: Musical Realism = 320,000 Gauss! Get real - Get horns.

Posted by Tom Brennan (A) on August 4, 2001 at 02:24:34

In Reply to: Musical Realism = 320,000 Gauss! Get real - Get horns. posted by vacuous on August 3, 2001 at 21:19:35:

Vacuous--I don't know any hornys raving about big-bucks stuff, it seems to be hi-end type people and not traditional hornys that are raving about the ridiculously priced Avant Gardes and such. You can get great sound using used Altec and JBL gear, it doesn't cost much used and even new JBL Pro speaker components look cheap next to the cost of completed hi-end speaker systems of much lower performence. For under $1000 you can put together an Altec or JBL 2-way with a 15" vented woofer and a horn top end. Buy used drivers and crossovers and build your own box or for under a grand you can find vintage Altecs like Iconics and Valencias or "gray box" VOTs. Compression drivers and good high-efficiency woofers have changed very little since the 1930s and 40s, guys like Wente, Lansing and Hilliard hit on the right way to make good speakers pretty early on, what with the resources of the Phone Company and film industry behind them, speakers are afterall some of the simplist of machines. The improvements to normal speakers over the years have been efforts to make bad speakers better, to get decent sound from small boxes and cheap drivers. Now the hi-end is discovering underhung voicecoils for woofers, big wow, Altec and JBL have been making woofers like that for over 50 years. This is what horn lovers like about horns (and I'm talking serious compression-driver, big woofer speakers here, not little Voight pipes with cheap cones or single driver rigs with undersized rear horn bassbins like Lowthers): the sound is easy and undistorted, dynamics are very lifelike and there is never a sense of strain. Musical instruments can be reproduced with startling clarity, the instruments themselves sound more alive and real. This is where I think hornys and conventional hi-enders are on different paths. I hear hi-enders constantly describing sound in terms of depth, soundstage, image etc., in visual terms. Yet this search for soundstage etc. brings one no closer to the actual sound of music, it's like these guys want to hear the hall instead of the music. I know of no audiophile speakers that can sound like an actual Fender Bass played through a Dual Showman or an actual sax or a SG and a Marshall 1959 stack, but horn rigs can do this. I don't want to hear where the bass is placed in the soundstage, I want it to sound like an actual bass is in the room. Look at it this way, the actual clues that cue you that actual live music is being played have nothing to do with imaging or stereo placement but everything to do with hair-trigger dynamics and the ability to move lots of air, right now, with low distortion and horns excell at that. When you walk past a bar you know when the music is an actual band and that has nothing to do with soundstage. The same when a kid down the street is practicing the trumpet or the local garage band is practicing. Joe Roberts put it well when he said that normal audiophiles were looking for a "you are there" presentation of the sound but that hornys are looking for "they are here". I'll take "they are here".

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