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In Reply to: RE: I'm Curious... posted by RGA on December 16, 2016 at 21:26:07
Horns , large or small don't sell well here for some reason...
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You can trace the decline of domestic horn sales in the US and Europe against the increase in domestic sales of high power SS amps over the same time.
SS was better than tubes. More power, less heat, less space. With more power available, all of a sudden listeners did not need 2 big horn boxes to achieve high SPL and deep bass in home.
Smaller always is better. Average size of a suburban home from the 50's to the early 80's was less than 2000 sqft.
Asia never abandoned tubes and began to embrace Altec, JBL and WE horns and tube amps in the early mid 70's. Search online for pictures of Asian audiophiles using theater horns in their systems. Many are installed into spaces barely larger than a US master bedroom. Size doesn't matter, only the sound. We have other priorities in the west....
They used to - Klipsch, Altec, JBL and the king daddy Western Electric.
Good horns are BIIIIG and Expensive. And like it or not the middle class is shrinking - more options for younger people to spend their money (home theater and video games and smartphones).
I wonder how often you have been out to Hong Kong or China or South Korea to hear some of the big horns?
Maybe Horns will come back with the Middle Class .... :)
IMO Horns stop being a big seller in the 70's , i owned my last one in 79 and have only seen them sporadically during the 80/90's and not until very recently have i heard one worthwhile and always at the other end of a good SET ...No SET , no sound .... With SET , Serious ....
Edits: 12/19/16
It would be one that doesn't honk, always sound like "Winchester Cathedral" or sound like a collection of dissimilar parts. Like a Danley SH60 where all frequencies radiate from the same mouth with consistent directivity.
Perfect for when on the golf course .... :)
Why do you think that is the case? One theory would be that the horns are so revealing that the flaws of most other designs laid bare.
I heard a horn SS setup one year in Munich. It was still listenable but the potential of that speaker was clearly untapped as evidenced the next year when they had big SET monos on them.
Class A PP triode can also work quite well with horns, so not just SET but SET is preferred I would say.
They also make electrostats sound better but there are obviously more matching issues with that type of speaker.
It doesn't help that emasculated reviewers who are not allowed to have a speaker with anything larger than a 4 inch woofer in 18X40 living room because the wife will beat them continually tout LS-3/5a and other completely dynamically inept speakers as things we should spend $2,000 on.
But hey if you buy two sets and an equally wimpy center channel - it can all be saved with a big fat sub the wife can use as a coffee table. Let's face it - horn speakers are typically hideous to look at. Big speakers are well big and by extension ugly. There's a reason those stupid little Bose cubes sell so well. And hey you can always try to convince yourself it's good. It's just funny to see rooms here in Hong Kong with ridiculously massive Tannoys or JBLS while it is also ridiculous to see the average US home with a Totem Model One as the main speaker. It's just so weird.
But here is something I notice living in HK...and it is only anecdotal to people I have personally met - but my co-teacher and I were talking about stereos (reviewing and such) and I asked her if she had a system - Sure - a B&W loudspeakers, A Naim amplifier etc. Another woman has Sennheiser HD 600s, and an OPPO headphone amp. I mean this is not uncommon - women are into music here and they value it. Classical and jazz aren't relegated to one shelf in a CD selling shops. I have gone to the dealer where the wife is taking an active role in the listening and buying decisions. And they were listening to Einstein and Audio Note back to back. I shared the couch and she was mentioning very relevant aspects to the sound.
I almost never saw that in the west.
I think it's also too hard a sell for dealers - it's easier to sell mainstream heavily advertised stuff and simple concepts. It obviously works in all sorts of parameters in society - sell them easy to grasp things: More watts is better (like megapixels), more features is better (new technology is always best), and lots of baffle-gab on the technological advancements that a Wave Radio is better than a million dollar theater.
I had to check I wasn't in the twilight zone - the three of us agree that A good SET on a Good Horn is awesome? Wow.
Merry Christmas!
Time to buck up then and get some horns to go with your LM 219...something like a LM WE replica system perhaps??
Nope I live in Hong Kong - the apartment won't fit a horn. I just bought new AN E/Spx HE Alnico Hemp speakers for myself for Christmas. You can see them in the thread posted on Steve Hoffman's forum as he owns the exact same pair. This is the most money I have ever spent on an audio component - I had to sell my AN J/Spe but fortunately I paid $2500 for them in 2004 and sold them for $2900 in 2016. And you wonder why I am a fan.Consider that back then for the same $2500 I could have purchased the Reference 3a MM De Capo - I saw a set in Hong Kong selling for $650 in perfect shape.
But when I eventually move to a larger space - Horns will be on the list - that may be ten years so a lot can happen from now until then.It's off to Melbourne for Christmas and New Years - let bygones be bygones and all that.
My post is on page 4
Edits: 12/21/16
You bought another AN speaker , I'm shocked , maybe in 10 yrs AN will have Horns ... :)
Well I had the choice of buying what I like or buying what other people like. I would not think that that would shock anyone.
Ha - so in other words they won't be coming back.
One day business will learn that the more people who have no money the more people can't buy anything that they're selling. Henry Ford knew that his employees needed to be able to make enough money to pay rent, buy food, clothe their kids, and have enough money left over to buy his cars.
A Good SET and a good horn - I love. It would be nice if regular people could afford it.
Horns were always for the masses...just not to own at home. All those WE speakers and amps were strictly professional use in PA and movie theaters. Only recently did the idea come to buy up old ones and put them at home. Same for the Altec VOTT systems. Only later did they make more domestic friendly systems and they were never full horn.
Klipsch for a long time made one of the few true horns for domestic use and it is rather large despite being a folded horn. It has flaws but most haven't heard it with a good SET.
In the 70's i had a VOTT in my home :) , the first Klipsh i ever heard was their folded horn when i was 15ys old, playing thru Marantz toobs, even then it was rare to see them, my neighbor had that one , i may have heard that model only 5 times in over 40 yrs, so still not common to see.
Back in the early 70's it was not unusual to see horns in homes, but they were still not main stream , the masses bought regular type box speakers , most of us with horns moved to stats in the early 80's and later apogee's , Panel speakers were the rage during the 80's , Horns disappeared off the radar completely until recently.
Personally i could never get over their coloration and honk , even today. The best ones are better with timbre, but still some honk, I'm sure some philes find Honk to be dynamics , but it sounds unusual and unnatural to to me. In that case i prefer large scale ribbons and dynamic speakers, they have to be large and multi -driver to get the thd down on dynamics, philes buying 70,80,150,400K single point source drivers looks like madness to me , big speaker small sound compressed dynamics in the mid-high area. I can see someone living with one of those jumping to horns..
Horns really , really sound good to me on SET's and SET's only and only if the SET is driving everything, the magic with SET's is the bass/midbass area , they get this right compared to most amplfiers, this is where they have their jump, listen to a speaker system not setup for an SET amp and it's sounds wrong and bi-amping is the worst , as it kills the SET advantage. SET coupled to class-D = most wrong ..
On acoustic instruments , Horns can be the best, they capture the percussive energy in the mids/high better than other speaker types, if what you listen to, is mostly acoustic instruments and small ensembles , et al, then very hard to beat a top horn SET combination..
A good horn and a 5 watt SET can do the deal.
Recently a dealer who sells horn speakers, also mentioned to me they are a hard sell here in the states. The Surge in audio during the 70/80's went away when non audiophiles stop buying and went into HT. Asia is much more into 2 ch and has been for at least 3-4 decades now.
Sales there is a must ...
Regards..
Regular people bought Klipsch or built their own and no , Horns will never be main stream...
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