Here is a new Horn company Haniwa Cybernetic Audio System. As anyone else they present something “new”, “revolutionary”, “first in the world” and “no where else available”. I never have seen or heard them, though they are local in Massachusetts and perhaps I will come across to them sometimes. They will be also presented in NY next week. I will not be coming of course but it be heard.  The Cogent’s Steve caught them in California where they, according to Steve, were warming up this installation before to demo it in NY. I do not know if it is true but if it is then it would be commendable as the Morons usually drop at the show the dead cold new equipment that is usually revolting…. Anyhow, the Haniwa company:

http://www.haniwaaudio.com/

I read their presentation file:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/pdf/HaniwaWebBroch.pdf

I do not like some from it and I even found some of their comments quite bogus. Still, they are perfectly within their birth-rights to do whatever they do.  The more horns the merrier…

Wojtek wrote:

.As to those pathetic pipes .... those pipes worth maybe $100 are in pair with most of high-end junk offerings on the market.

Henry wrote:

I've heard these Haniwa speakers on Sunday. They sounded terrible. My niece and her boyfriend went on Friday and couldn't get Kubo to play something other than classical music. When playing classical music, the sound was okay but kinda boomy. I found out why he insisted on his own musical selections on Sunday when I was successful in getting Kubo to play a Lisa Ono song from a CD. The bass that came out was so muddy and wooly and boomy as though it coming out of a barrel. Kubo ended up stopping the cd player midway through the song and handing me my disc back and saying that there was something wrong with the recording! Luckily for me I used that same song in many other rooms and it sounded absolutely awesome, particularly in the TAD speaker room using Model 2 speakers, which I thought were the best of the show.

Mind boggling iteration! I.e. & eliminating common denominators, "If the sound is wrong... it is wrong."
Agreed. IMO they are right -- ain't no two ways about it.

The Cybernetic Audio System, on the other hand, uses a closed-loop feedback system to compensate for phase shift to optimize the sound

A microphone captures the speaker output in your listening area, feeding it into our FPIC-100 Digital Signal Processor.  (...)The result is the vivid reproduction of every note for a natural, room-filling sound.

Paul S wrote:

Romy, no doubt the following derives wholly from my ignorance on the subject, but I have not been able to get away from a sense of "variable compression" with any compression horns I have tried.  By "variable compression" I mean that the compression effect is like a trombone that re-shapes notes according to frequency and volume and also sounds to me like a "trombone" with respect to dynamics, in a similar but not entirely parallel manner. A while back I heard and found very interesting a ridiculously priced pair of large TAD "Pro Monitors".  They were quite aggressive, but they sounded to me less trombone-like than other horns I remembered at the time.   But, now that you mention it, there was a fairly consistent sort of "pressure" about the sound that made it somewhat menacing, even with lighter music.  Still, better tonal accuracy than I had heard from horns before, and pretty good continuity, too. I have been keeping a weather eye out for horn talk I can relate to, and your mention of the TAD as "violently" compressing has me wondering how one avoids both the violent and the trombone-type compression. Obviously, I have not heard every compression horn...

Paul, what you refer to when you talk about the “trombone dynamics” has nothing to do with horns but rather with the greed and partially stupidity of the horn builders. A horn has lower pass-through frequency that determined but the size of mouth, let call it Fpass. A horn has a driver with it’s electrical high pass filter, let call it Fcut. The proximity between the Fpass and Fcut is very important – I call it the “Horn No Man Lend”. It would depending from the type of driver, crossover type, the given octave, type of horn and many other factor and might vary in some case to be more then a hole octave. What the stupid people do is disregard that “Horn No Man Lend” making the crossover point to close to the horn’s Fpass. It is perfectly understandable why they do it – to get more frequency out of minimum size but it unfortunately severely screw up sound, making the horn to choke with exercise LF. So, the very next time when you see a proper horn (not the Altec/JBL piece of crap) that from you point of view demonstrate the “trombone dynamics” try to increase the crossover point at this horn for a half of a third of octave. In 95% of all cases the “trombone dynamics” will be gone. There are some other reasons why the ““trombone dynamics” might take please but still there are way to deal with it.