I know, I know, I know…

Any person who in one way or other practices horn-loading loudspeakers has a wet dream about bass horns.  Here and there people built them. Here and there you can hear the assuring and overconfident statements like: “there is nothing like bass from the bass horn”.  Being a devotee of horn-lording direction I should enthusiastically spout the bass horns ambitions but I do not. In really I do not practice horns but rather I try to practice better sound. So with respect to better sound I admit the idea not juts horns but properly sounding horns. Therefore I am not supporting the hype about bass horns as with all best intentions of people who do it, the bass horn never sound correct.

In any horn the diameter of throat and the rapidness of the horn expansion determine the rate of horn equalization. If you shot for 6-9dB equalization then you are with small throat and slow opening rate. This way the entrance of the horn has a lot of near parallel surfaces that act as resonance chambers.  Did you even try to drive a tone across this “pipe”, I would not even mention an impulse or anything like that?

Anyhow, the point that I am trying to make is that there is a very reasonable and very sensible balance between the throat diameter,  capacity of  radiating surface, horn opening rate and the targeting frequency. Make larger then necessarily throat diameter and your horn will at  lover frequencies to act as a direct radiator (98%n of all “bass” horns out there). Make smaller then necessarily tghe throat diameter and your horn will sound like any other sewer pipe with articulation  and tone of a person singeing while swallowing 543 hot-dogs. It is possible by mitigating between throat, profile, driver and the mouths rate to found a perfect equilibrium. I feel that if everything else is done right then the minimum frequency where horn loading still makes sense is around 50Hz -60Hz. With loner frequency the problems avalanche and the alternative methods of bass reproduction become more effective and successful.