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This is the last article in the planed overview. Here I would like to cover options available among commercially available High-Efficiency systems. As you might expect it will not be too exiting.

In a ways commercial systems inherent all problems of my previous two articles – hard to get truly good sounding drivers and hard to get sanely performing horns. However, there is much more problem with the whole systems. The integration problem, the architecturing problem, the shipping problems, the cost restrictions, the installation problems and many other issues really kills the horns setups or make them less attractive as commercially-successful systems.

Horns in a way enjoy today some popularly and public expectance but I see the picture very far from celebratory.  Today any Moron implementing any indentation in a baffle proposing that his acoustic system became horn-loaded. The amount of fools who is willing to pontificate foolishness about horns and make absolutely insane bloopers with horns design is ridicules. That all leads to many-many horns attempts but it also leads to very poor actual results from all those attempts as Good Sound does not obey the rules of egos and dire taste but follows its own principles. The good things for many “bloopery” horn manufacturers is that most of their “customers to be” have very low demands and absolutely no sense of what they need to hear from speakers. As the result the idiots-consumers do buy bad acoustic systems not because of their sound but because of many other reasons, mostly to get a satisfaction to the frustration that was implanted into buyers by the marketing bullshit.

Generally speaking a CES-like audio trade shows are a good indication of common tendencies in speaker building and the High-Efficiency horns are not an exception.  Each year brings more and more horns but they are generally not better but worse and mostly they are improperly made in different manners.  I very attentive observe what is being made with horns over the years and I did not see any interesting and inspiring horns-centric ideas. People just re-render various dreadful designs and demonstrate badly performing installations where they in different way recite the faulty but “convenient” mistakes. The common tendencies of all commercial horns miss-aliments of drivers, use of poor drivers, improper migration ideas, overloading horns with LF, improper channel slicing, improper selection of horns, improper horn-driver integration, improper horns making, under-loading of the drivers, improper use of channel and many others. In most of the cases the designers themselves are just too ignorant to understand what they do, why they do what they do and in some cases the products designers go for consciousnessly wrong directions because the cost and marketability of their products.

I need to make clear that the fact that some kind of product out there did not comply with my idea of “proper horn setup” do not automatically make the speaker bad. There are plenty of good direct radiator systems (or other topologies) out there and no all acoustic systems must use horn-loading.  However, the targets of my observations are the systems with over 100dB sensitively and mostly horns. So, I have no problem to put myself on the position of being horno- snob and say “if you do horns then do it properly”. Very few do, and very few among those that do are coming out of closets with commercial systems.

I certainly am not familiar with everything that is done out there but whatever is exposed publicly on internet I am well familiar and I do pay attention. I admit that I enjoy re-thinking again and again about the “stimulating elegancy” of an abstract horn installation and I always look for new inspirations. Unfortunately my definition of elegancy does not imply compromises of the things that I believe are important. I know what is important in horns systems and what is not important and I know how the important/unimportant things sound. There are practically none of the commercial horn systems know to me that do not slip in what is important. Why I said “practically”? Well, there are 1.5 exceptions.

The only one full exception from the long list of the boring, ignorant or juts idiotic designs I would grant to a German speaker:  Cessaro Gamma. This speaker, despite having some things that I do not appreciate, but it still is the most accurate approximation to the proper design of horn-loaded acoustic system commercially available. The 0.5 exception goes to an American from Tennessee Jeffery Jackson. From a few post that he made in past at this site it was obvious that he is not a Moron in the horn thinking and since he put himself as CES vendor last year then he declared his intend to commercialize his design ideas. I think his designs are premature so far as products. He has good ideas and good intend but they did not compile themselves yet to a complete expression in a shape of merchandise. What he did so far was “not there yet” but I feel that he is in the right direction and soon on later he might come up something interesting commercially-available.

It is about it. I do not see any other serious commercial adventures out there. If you know about any that were missed from my attention then let me know.

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