In my observations about the SEC 2006 I associated the high-end industry with a strip join. Continuing this thinking I have to admit that Srajan Ebaen’s 6Moons.com site remind me a strip join with inflatable robotic girls. The all girls there are all Barbies, perfectly dressed and colorfully painted but they have no smell or idiosyncrasy in behavior; also they deflates what you “use” them. Sorry for being too pervert but it is not me but the influence of the 6Moons. Really, the picture and the presentation at the Srajan Ebaen’s site is very pleasant but the substance of writing and the level of audio thinking are in the best traditions of well-celebrated audio Mormonism.

A few days ago a visitor of my site sent me a link pointing to the 6Moons’ articulate about 6 ways horn installation.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/westernelectric/300b.html

Srajan Ebaen calls it audio review… good for him. God bless his with many year of health but if he decide to go to see a doctor for a casual check up and ask a doctor to review the state of his health then I think he would expect some substance from the doctor, instead of the doctor singing to him hymns about the beauty of medial care.

Anyhow, since the Cypriot audiophile Dan’s system is horn installation I consider it in my territory and there for sake of horn education I decided to post some rhetorical questions regarding what I have seen and that Srajan Ebaen presumably considered “not important”. Form my point of view those questions are the ONLY important question in this installation and all the rest in this system is… the deflectable strip join girls…

Image courtesy to 6Moons.com

1) 30-foot long straight bass horns? Great! When those people learn that to mention with admiration the length of the bass horn is unnecessary without mentioning to basic facts: mass/material of the bass horns and the way how the delays was resolved.

2) Large scorpion-tailed midbass horns? They do look great but they do looks to light for given frequency, not to mention that, again, there is no implication not they time-aligned.
 
3) Acapella ion tweeter? Wonderful drivers. However no one ever was able to integrate this driver with anything! Did Cypriot audiophile Dan was successful in the plasma tweeter integration of Srajan just did not care?

4) The tweeters are on the outside in the horizontal offset? You got to be kidding me???!!! Do the Cypriot audiophile Dan’s or Srajan Ebaen have ears? I can underwrite my assessment that those tweeters will NEVER could acceptable…. unless they do not care.

5) The ion tweeters usually sit on high crossover. With almost 2-3 feet excursion of the ion tweeters relative to the MF driver could you imagine the considerable amount of the group delay that this system has at HF?

Anyhow, looking what the Cypriot audiophile Dan have done I have quite a lot of skepticism. I have no skepticism about the Srajan article everything is too selfevident in there. It looks like he wrote about the 300B. Why did he listen his “great” WE 300B in context of a questionably sounding system? Perhaps he selects the playbacks for his publication according to the photogenic qualities only? I am sure that the owner of the above-mentioned strip join paints their inflatable girls according to the very same criterion… It’s quite pity in the both cases….

Rgs,
Romy the caT

One thing to bear in mind with the bass horn delay - I thank Tom Danley for explaining all this a while ago - if I understand it right, a small direct radiator (ie small in relation to the wavelength - which will obviously be the case with bass) *always* has a 90 degree phase shift, in addition to that caused by any roll-off (minimum phase system implies a direct correspondence between frequency response and phase shift).

So at very low frequencies, a misaligned *true* bass horn could still have better time alignment than a "geometrically aligned" direct radiator, esp. if the latter is vented etc. 

At 20hz, a sealed system eq'd to flat will still have a delay equivalent to 4 or 5m, which is less than the horn length in this case. And the horn will probably add some delay as it probably isn't long enough to give zero phase at 20Hz.

The thing with the horn though is that its frequencies will have the same group delay (unlike the direct radiator which spreads them out in time). Despite being late, at least the guests will show up together. Not sure what this equates to in sonic terms; I've never heard a front loaded bass horn.

As for the misalignment of all the MF and HF drivers, I'm with you.

cheers
cv

I pretty sure we are talking the same things, ie  

Phase shift = frequency dependent delay - spreads a signal out

Geometric arrival delay is linear phase - delays all frequencies equally (obviously)

I was just hypothesizing that a slightly geometrically misaligned bass horn might, overall, have better *group* delay characteristics than a perfectly (geometrically) aligned direct radiator.

I would guess that it is partly the higher frequencies coming out of the bass unit that make the geometrical misalignments so audible.

regards,
cv

Actually you put it absolutely beautifully; I should map your post to the Knowledge Tree. I would put in your formulation one more ingredient: the reverberation time in the room. The larger room and longer decay at the given frequencies the less announce of delayed bass inflicts. I think in environment of the longer decay there are conditions for greater phase pandomanizarion that masks out the delays problems. E larger rooms there are own problems not relayed to the delays. However I am a firm believer that in context of regular near field the anal-retentive time and arrival alignment is essential. This is why (one of the reasons) I do not support the idea of sub bass horns. As well, any single installation of the bass horns that herd or seen was very questionable. It is one thing to make big horn and to make the shiny photographs of them and it is another thing is to make them to sound acceptable. Unless the objective is to satisfy the primitiveial demeans of an audio reviewer….

The caT