Tony L
Administrator
The “horn sound” manifests itself to me as a sort of beam of sound effect. It’s not just horns, Quad ESL 63s have poor vertical dispersion and the music sounds to me like it’s coming through a letterbox. During my experiments with speakers, I’ve realised that diffraction effects and reflections that disturb the presence region are really quite unpleasant. I don’t know if it’s because this presence region is heightened by Horn type speakers, but I find them less than ideal?
I’m the opposite. I love really directional speakers as long as they are setup well as you get the sound so much ahead of any room reflection. The video I took the piss out of upthread with the Jubilees setup in what looked like a reverb chamber (as most modern minimalist rooms are in effect) is amusing as if one has to live with a room as terrible as that then horns are by far the best way to deal with it. A conventional wide-dispersion speaker would sound exponentially worse as you’d get a shed-load of early reflections mixed in. Even in a really good well damped room like mine horns still offer an advantage and get closer to a studio control room or headphone perspective where you hear more of the acoustic of the recording, not of the room. A full-range fairly directional point-source remains my speaker ideal.