GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: For one day only

Post Subject: Scalford: another view from a perpetratorPosted by amdismal on: 3/8/2013

And as one of the other perpetrators...

The nature of this kind of thing is compromise. The owner of the bass horn system wanted to run them together, for the enlarged horn mouth, and so we did - there was never going to be enough time to play about with placement. I run my sub horns outside of my main horn array, although this is necessary given the room layout. We did discuss the idea of a mono tapped horn next year, to do 17Hz to 35Hz, to fill out the last organ stop, although this may well end up with a different set of compromises and sound no better.

The crossovers were fourth order, which is what I use on my horns. Second order, I have found, can give a better blending, but reduced the delicacy and transparency in my system. But it's very complicated, and further exacerbated by the (potentially quite steep) crossovers that are already in the horn design, so a second order electronic may create a fourth order overall. I find it quite difficult to decide what measures best, and the listening also tends to be preference at the time, rather than anything I could consider absolute. We didn't play Op. 131, but we did play the Op. 74 'harp' quartet, and the realistic placement and timbre of each instrument as they played the 'plucked harp' from bottom to top was really impressive for a scratch system.

Most interesting to me was the range of views we got from visitors. I'll ignore the Saturday evening, as there had been plenty of beer and the system was definitely dialled into 'fun mode', with bass shaking the room; from Sunday mid morning it was sounding excellent, to my ears. What I thought it did really well was present a real sense of space, a soundstage in which the instruments played, and scale. It could realistically portray a full orchestra (more Beethoven for fragile Sunday heads) but also give a beautiful rendition of a real voice. It exceeded my expectations, even though it had some clear (to me) flaws in certain colorations and distortions.

There were quite a few people who were properly blown away by it, basically saying that it sounded like live music (which it could achieve both for acoustic and amplified live music). Many of these had not heard a large scale horn system before, and indeed many did not even realise that there are some mad people who have this kind of thing at home. But I was staggered by the number of people who did not actually really 'listen' to it with their ears - they seemed to compartmentalise it as a PA system, and then went on to listen to the small hifi boxes elsewhere in the show for a taste of 'real' hifi.

There were some systems I quite liked there - a Snell A system and smaller horn system (with 2-way Tune Audio Marvels) were of particular note, and the DIY Westminsters were remarkable from a build perspective, if struggling acoustically in a terrible room. However, in my view our big horn system was the only one that actually came close to reproducing real music, and stood head and shoulders above all the other systems for this reason, but few others seemed to think so. I am constantly surprised that so many people clearly want something so different from me, but I guess that people can choose their own compromises...

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