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RE: Horns for Hi-Fi - what happened ?

Posted by nl (A) on October 12, 2010 at 14:11:26

In Reply to: Horns for Hi-Fi - what happened ? posted by J. Phelan on October 12, 2010 at 05:07:25:

A lot of "high end" speakers are really deluxe versions of mid-fi speakers. If you look at a 1990s megaspeaker like a Wilson WAMM or something like that, you usually find what amounts to a bookshelf speaker (6" cone, 1" dome) mated to some big woofers. Even today, a lot of superdeluxe speakers are really just very expensive versions of the stuff you find at Best Buy. The point is, the designs were based on what sells, and what sells is what people are used to.

Most people, no matter what their income, don't want big 1950s style horns in their home. Heck, this was probably even true in the 1950s, but in those days they only had one speaker, in a corner, not two in the middle of the living room. Plus, as noted before, a lot of solid state amplifiers from 1970-2000 sound terrible with horns. They've gotten better in the last ten years or so.

Then of course were those people who actually did want horns. What did they do? Mostly buy vintage Altec, JBL etc. for much, much less than the cost of producing these things new. There were so many old horns out there that it was difficult to sell a new one to those who wanted them.

On top of all that, big horns are just expensive and hard to design. It is so much easier to time align and integrate a 1" tweeter and 6" cone than it is to time align a couple of horns. Plus, the cost of cones/domes is so much less than horns, which means larger profit margins of course.

With all that said, horns should be more popular today than they are. I don't mean mega horn systems, but a simple 12" cone/1" compression driver kit like a Yorkville E12 (about $1200 a pair) should be an easy go-to solution for a lot of people.

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