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Perhaps, however how to estimate and to interpret them? If we are talking about the compression driver then they all made very crappy and each driver might sound very differently because the alignment, centering and many other reasons. In past I was trying to select better performing drivers using a good microphone and a distortion analyzer but I was not able to interpret what I measured and there was no relations between the measurable and auditable. I was able to say by measurements is the driver was completely screwed but the minute nuanced  of tone and contrast were completely not related to the distortion pattern

----Higher even order distortion sounds richer and makes the sound "more live" to most people. YOu can get that anywhere in the signal chain.

MusicLover wrote:

Decay characterisitics of the driver material (how does a pulse in an anechoic chamber decay?)

I really do not know what it would be and how it would relates to anything. Certainly the driver material is superbly important but how the anechoic chamber decay would manifest itself with tonal and contrast qualities of the driver in the real world it would be completely unknown to me. I know John Dunlavy told me that he recorded string quartets in his large anechoic chamber and was trying playing those recordings to make some further conclusions. When he told me that I almost fall asleep…

---If I play a note in a trumpet, just one note, and stop, the mouth of the trumpet (also a horn, yes?) leads to a certain decay of that note.
SAme with a piano. different decay.

Now, how should a speaker driver material behave? Should it behave like hte piano or the trumpet. Or should it not have any decay at all?
I personally like paper cone drivers, and older horns.

MusicLover wrote:

ANd the biggest thing: Recording quality

It is something that I completely ignore when I think about the drivers quality.

--Of course. But I hope you will agree it drives sound quality a LOT.

MusicLover wrote:

I like ALtec & klipsch horns. Both are very nice.

I’m not a big fan of Altecs. Their MF drivers are mostly very slow and very gray tonally. Their bass drivers better but unfortunately they never had serious enclosures to make Altec to sound responsibly good for the high demands home installations. Klipsch kind of in the same domain with Altecs only the Klipsch horns were even more disgusting then the Altecs. Ironically, although they both, Altec and Klipsch are conceded the primary US horn companies from past, but they did nothing else then applying the principles of high acoustic pressure generation and presumed that it would be good enough for Sound.. They did "survivable"  PA systems, letting the Jews to dance Hava Nagila during thier wedding ceremonies but THAT Sound has no relation to a high fidelity of Musuc reproduction. In fact, they did quite a lot of harm convincing many people (including you, MusicLover) that horns have some indispensable and non-resolvable negative characteristics.

---WEll, I haven;t heard all horns, mainly from Klipsch & altec, and also quite a few horns that wer edesigned using hornrep and other software.
I have no idea what you mean by slow & gray. I assume you are trying to convey some sort of emotion you feel when you listen to these horns, but I honestly don;t feel that. I like them!

ANyway, to each his own.
ML

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