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Horn-Loaded Speakers
Topic: Commercially available BS, Avantgardes and ....whatever

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Posted by angeloitacare-idiot on 10-26-2006
4 way horn system.bmp

hi romy

idea of a  4way speaker system. not time aligned, but in compensation  mid-bass horn and mid-high  would  create a
one point source.

30hz - ~ 120hz
Bass cabinet similar to bassmaxx 

 http://www.speakerstore.nl/index.php?l=nl&pg=11&c=18

 driver cgn 18

 http://www.bhivemotor.com/

~120hz - ~600hz

mid bass horn with  1m diameter
driver    fane cres10m

http://www.bkelec.com/Pro/Drive_Units/Fane/Cres10M.htm

~ 600hz - 20khz
mid high horn mounted inside mid-bass horn 0,40cm diameter
driver tad, altec, jbl etc.

regards angelo


Posted by Romy the Cat on 10-26-2006
Angelo,

Although the idea might be looks like an “elegant” at a hi-fi shows but unfortunately it has a lot of pitfalls, the terminal pitfalls for my point of view. This is only my opinion but still:

1) LF channel- the bassmaxx. I never had or heard it and can hardly comment on it. There is a lot of noise and hype recently about the bassmaxx solution but all people who I meat who loved the bassmaxx drove their bassmaxx with Crown or Gemini amplifiers and listed pop music. So, I very mach predisposed against it, no mater now little it means.

2) The mid-bass Fane Crescendo 10M. This is complicated. The Fane drivers are very freaky – some of their models are good, some of them bad with any reasons or justifications. In addition any driver when you place it in mid-bass horn begins to sound different and the patters are not always obvious. Also, when you squeeze a driver with back chamber you have the driver begin to behave as “compression driver” and it changed the driver sound very dramatically.

3) The mid-bass horn. Any folded horn is not a horn but a sequence of wave guiding resonating chambers. I personally believe that the entire concept of horn, as it know today to audio people is fundamentally faulty. A horn is not a sensitively boosting machine or the pressure impedance transformer but an equalizer and equalizer only. Consider a horn as a Dolby decoder and from here it would be very obviously why no one should use the sequence resonating chambers to decode a Dolby encoded source or to write a RIAA curve…

4) “~ 600hz - 20khz” – whatever it was it does not exist.

5) The mounting of tweeter presumably inside of MF horn is bead idea: reflections, HF attenuation and so on…

6) Time alignment, it is a key in horn design… nothing further could be said.

Rgs, Romy

Posted by angeloitacare-idiot on 10-26-2006
audio voice.GIF

hi romy

my goal is to design a hornspeaker with drivers, that are today commercially available, s2's are not.
tomorrow i get my bms horns from bd-design, then i can say something abought them. as  they are coax, with tweeters, i did not design a tweeter horn.  
the fane is a idea, of course tweak and experimenting around would be necessary, to choose the best drivers and setup. unfortunately this design above remebers very much avantgarde, but if this is the way to go... already using wooden horns, and other drivers, will make a consistent difference.
price i got here from factorys to make the 1m diameter horn is too expensive. the best would be if i could buy a wood lathe and make them by myself. can u give me the fone numer of the guy that made yours ?

regards angelo

Posted by Romy the Cat on 10-26-2006


Angelo,

I care less about the “commercially available” objectives, honestly it is too boring.

However, whatever you do not be distracted that what you are making will be reminding Avantgardes. The Avantgarde Trio Classic (in vertical configuration) approach was very good and I learned a lot from it. There was nothing wrong in what Avantgarde did and if you go for any 4ways horn installation with horns then the Avantgarde Trio scenario is only one reasonable way to go: my older Macondo, Edgar’s Titans implement the very same scenario as Avantgarde Trio. The geometry of the horns set the rules and there is no other way to set the horns. Of course the implementation of the Avantgarde Trio was very poor: cheap and colorless driver with ceramic magnets, stupid front chambers on loading, absent of back chamber, dumping of the MF diaphragms with ferrofluid, wrong positioning and time misalignment of a tweeter… and many other things that they do wrong. However it means nothing and in the very same configuration it possible to get very good results if to do everything properly and do not cheat.

I do not believe in commercial fortune of properly made 4-ways horns and good luck if you do. Also the Avantgarde Trio were phenomenal success for a few years (amount of the sold) but it had nothing to do actual sound of those horns in the room but was purely the efforts of the Avantgarde’s US distributor + some favorable industry conditions.

Also, one more tip if you willing to think in this direction. The CGN 18 looks like OK driver (although the Fs too high for this motor) but I personally feel that line array are way better solution for LF section (not to mention the sampler foot print). What you make horn, particularly the 3 horn in virtual line sores configuration, and will experiment with integration of the horns with LF section then you might observe that LF line array “work different” then many other solutions.

Rgs,
The Cat

Posted by angeloitacare-idiot on 10-26-2006

 romy

i am not at all intentioned to make a horn speaker to get rich. i dont think abought this at all. for me its hobby.  
its  abought to have fun, and to get as close as possible reproduction of  live music. as closer, as better. for me the only way to go, is to figure out normally available drivers on the market.
if than i can share my experience, and may make available my horns to others, that would be great, who knows.
many use one horn from 150 or 200 hz up to 20khz. i' ve never heard all these oris, lowthers, fostex etc. , but i guess all that people cannot be complete morons, they have ears, so these solutions may not sound so bad at all. have u heard oris/aer combination , to have a objective idea abought it ?
tomorrow i will have send my aura 1808 from germany. very wondering abought its sound. but i dont know yet if i will built a horn sub for it, ore just a sealed box. but as i found only one, first i will use it only as subwoofer. may i find another one, and use it stereo.  

angelo


Posted by Romy the Cat on 10-26-2006
Angelo,

sorry I misunderstood you as I’m under impression that you look forward to come up with some kind of commercial product. (You implied it before). I hope you are an adult who has basic understanding of nature of products production? I’m not trying to be disrespectful but I think you misapprehend a nature of commercial manufacturing. If you do something on our own in your rooms then it is absolutely irrelevant what level of decisions or implementation you employ. However, when you aim for a small mass production then you are in totally new coordinate systems as the levels of implementations have direct bind to many other criteria.  Prices, sourcing, reliability, sustaining cost, shippabilety, marketability and many other factors become the keys. All of it, and many other things provide a certain feedback to own design objectives and … you end up with Avantgarde-like. Be prepared that if you make anything worthy then it will have no or little value for others. So, deside for yourself what you do and them a lot of the things will be cleared to you.

Rgs,
The Cat

Posted by angeloitacare-idiot on 10-27-2006
romy

i certainly am misapprehend of commercial manufacturing. i have no skills at all for that. even to built a horn speaker, i have no skills . i am  just learning now, and dreaming.....

angelo

Posted by Dominic on 11-07-2006
romy-"A horn is not a sensitively boosting machine or the pressure impedance transformer but an equalizer and equalizer only. Consider a horn as a Dolby decoder"

But isn't it really all of the above. it's by means of all the other aspects that you end up with the equalizer.
There are a lot of hings that happen when you put anything in the path of a sound wave.
If you are trying to make music out of it then yes, focus on the way it sorts out the input, but you kind of have to understand the mechanics of sound versus barrier before you can make any 'Real-ly' useful changes.

hmm. maybe that gedes guy was onto something. Obviously if we are aiming for something higher in playback than what is usual you need to understand it scientifically; and then crucially, interpret it usefully. perhaps that's what let him down (assuming that his system doesn't sound great) his lack of making use to find any really interesting results, just proveable improvements.

Posted by Romy the Cat on 11-07-2006

 Dominic wrote:
romy-"A horn is not a sensitively boosting machine or the pressure impedance transformer but an equalizer and equalizer only. Consider a horn as a Dolby decoder"

But isn't it really all of the above. it's by means of all the other aspects that you end up with the equalizer.

Good catch, Dominic. It was a “loaded statement” on my part and I thought that it will be missed.

In the given case world “equalizer” has much extended meaning then just equalizer. The important thing in it - mentally go away from a concept of “impedance transformation”. You see, they are many books, articles and stupid programs are written about horns and all of them understand horn as a mechanism of propagation of acoustic pressure. It is fun to be able to circulate a phase shifts in each single point of a horn’a belly and it is fun to dive into lengthy discussion about the shaping of the wave front but the problem is that none of those “theories” ever were able to explain Sound that is coming from a horn/driver assembly.

It is virtually imposable to say what driver should do in order it to be sound good through a horn. I know, a lot of people would disagree with me and will recite the T/S characteristics… However, they can stick their recitations right into their asses. When they manage making musical and problem-free sounding horns installations instead of a pile of conceptual honky garbage then their lip-movement will be less meaningless for me.

So, we build Sound not Horns and therefore there are no impedance transformers. There are drivers and there are horns, the horns that make our drivers to sound more or less “compensated”. It is about balance, it is about sensibility, it is about prudence, it is about self-moderation, it is about having a very clear and very definitive vision what you want to get out of horn’s sound. And it is of course about your ability to employ different techniques in order to accomplish the Sound. Very few horns installations perform alike. For instance Bruce Edgar never was able to make two identically sounding horns and as I can see the subject it is perfectly OK. The multi-channels horn installations are live and vibrant organisms and as you said: “lot of things that happen when you put anything in the path of a sound”. Those “lot of things” are not necessary in compliance with stupid conceptual ideas: like boosting acoustic pressure by use of the front chambers.  The theory of pressure propagation explains the front chambers as a benefit however, the front chambers violate Sound. Here is why I like a mental picture that a horn is an equalizer.

Yes, a horn equalizers sound of a horn’s driver. Each horn, or each profile, of each mouth rate make equalization differently and each driver has own ability to be equalized. What is important, however, is do not take this equalization ONLY as juts frequency flatting but rather as equalization-normalization-harmonization. In addition, yes, a horn loading will boos some sensitivity (depends of many criteria) but it is secondary. The primary thing is that a horn should embrace the best that the driver has and after exposing the driver’s output to own equalization-normalization-harmonization it should bring it out the Proper SoundIt is imposable to make horn to sound well by juts looking at the horn theory (mostly existing theory is mistaken, completely obsolete or not applicable at all). To do so, would be similar to a woman who applies make up to her face but whiteout looking in the mirror… Imposable? Yes, imposable but it is exactly how most of the people approach horns.

So, why I propose that horn rather equalizer then impedance transformer? A transformer, from a very simplified abstract point of view, is self-contained devise that do not care about outside world. It has a transformer ratio and you just apply voltage to the primary and receive voltage at secondary. The inner behavior of a transformer will not change because the deeding AC was different. Yes, it will be different transformer for different frequencies or for pulses but still it will be the same basic operation: to render the transformation ratio. With a filter it’s slightly different because a filter does not have a self-contained propose. For intense in RIAA, Dolby or in the Tape EQ cases you need to know very precisely how your signals was the EQed in order to properly de-equalizer it. What I like about it that it set a reference to abstract “final objective normality of result” and forces a persons to look at the concluding Sound as applied objective outcome instead as at the outcome of some kind of semi-algebraic meditation about acoustic pressure. Pressure is good what you design some heavy duty hydraulic pressure machines but it has nothing to do with Sound. Even the acoustic pressure and acoustical Sound are frequently the players of the different teams…

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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