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Re: Open baffle and front horn, sound differences

Posted by nl (A) on April 5, 2007 at 14:24:55

In Reply to: Open baffle and front horn, sound differences posted by Inkasound on April 3, 2007 at 01:07:30:

Considering that I now have both side-by-side in my room here are my thoughts:

OB is easy. You can bang something together in about an hour, and you can spend as little as you like. I once had a mono fullrange-on-OB setup that consisted of an $8 (on sale) Radio Shack driver, a piece of 4"-wide scrap lumber, and some cardboard wings. It wasn't bad! That's a plus for the DIYer. There's something to be said for a project that you can actually sit and listen to. Also, by "easy" I mean that you get about 90% of what you're ever going to get with FR/OB with hardly any effort. That's different than, say, a sealed or ported box where you can fuss with damping, crossovers, etc. etc. forever.

I like the 6" FR+sub suggestion. There's a certain magic to FR drivers in the 4"-6" range. The 8"-or-bigger drivers seem to lose that midrange effortlessness to some degree, and rely more on their "whizzer cone" -- the typical tradeoff is more headroom, often better efficiency and more upper bass in the 100-200hz range. The 3"-or-smaller drivers lose lower midrange and have no headroom whatsoever. (They can be just the thing for a desktop-type system however, and I should point out that probably half of all DIY speakers built in Japan use the Fostex FE103) If you don't use a sub or helper woofer you are probably going to have virtually no bass below 80hz. Some people can live with that but I personally am about sick of anemic "audiophile" fullrange speakers.

OBs have a very spacious, reverberant, non-directional kind of presentation. Nothing wrong with that. Great for sitting out of the "sweet spot."

Horns are complicated. You are going to have crossovers, and multiple drivers. Then you have integration issues, questions about speaker-level or active/line-level XO, multiple amplifiers, on and on to any degree of complexity. If you use speaker-level XO, you lose that freshness that comes from a direct amp-driver connection. Construction tends to be complex, although you can work with ready-made speakers or modular components. Often expensive. Horns also tend to be directional, at least the simple flares favored by audio fans. You're bolted into the sweet spot.

In the end it tends to boil down to room size and how you want to listen, in my opinion. Plus, the degree to which you like to putter in the garage instead of listening to music. The bigger the room, and the more you want to listen at "performance volumes" (typically about 115db peaks whatever the style of music, no 5"-diameter piece of cardboard flapping around fullrange is going to deliver that) the more you'll appreciate horns. In a small apartment where you don't want to bother the neighbors, the FR strategy comes into its own. You can listen to horns at low levels as well, but their advantages over FRs are not as prominent in this format.

The same applies to amps as well. In a small room/low level format, you may be able to run a 90db fullranger from a 2A3 and be pretty happy. In a big 2000ft room, you might find that even with a huge 105db horn system, your 300B is running out of gas.

I've been experimenting with "wideband horns" with some success. It is all-but-impossible to find gear unless you spend considerable $$$. The present rig is a 200hz-5Khz compression driver plus a 5Khz+ bullet tweeter. With active highpass XO to the compression driver and a one-cap crossover to the tweeter, this gives most of the attractions of fullrange drivers with most of the advantages of horns, in my early opinion. The Lowther-on-150hz fronthorn comes to a similar middle ground from the other direction. Both are complicated by the fact that they don't mix well with off-the-shelf subwoofers.

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