Anybody listened to "The Horn" speaker built by Ed Schilling?

[robster]

Anybody listened to "The Horn" speaker from wwww.thehorneshoppe.com?

Ed Schilling builds them,he offers a 30-day money back guarantee and he's in S.C about 2-hours from me. What are your thoughts on their sound?

Cheers,

Robert

[colterphoto1]

http://www.thehornshoppe.com/

try this, too many W's and no 'E' after Horn. Interesting site.

[mobile homeless]

Anybody listened to "The Horn" speaker from Ed Schilling

I've exchanged a slew of mail with Ed and he's basically a good guy. There are some classic exchanges with Ed and others via the Audio Asylum HE Speaker Forum where one can observe the car wreck in slow motion in the privacy of one's own home. The speaker looks interesting but cant work miracles. It's basically a little Fostex avoiding Xover smear placed in his so-called "Horn" cabinet.

One amusing person to ask within this forum is Tom Brennan (TBrennan) who has some very definite opinions on this very speaker. Dont count on ole Tom to be too reticent regarding The Horn either. I think he might prefer it to a concrete post but only if used to hold up a plant, and preferably not of the dentist office variety....

In other forums and on his old site, Ed used to get some milage trying to compare The Horn to a set of LaScalas. Again, the exchanges at the Audio Asylum hold some beauty.

[robster]

Thanks Mobile Homeless,I love Wrightsville Beach. I have fond memories of family vacations there,my mom use to ride the trolly from Wilmington to Wrightsville when she was a teenager. My sister used to work at the marine bio lab durring the late 1970's just over the bridge.

Cheers,

Robert in Gastonia,NC

[sunnysal]

I have not listened to that particular speaker but I have played around A LOT with a fostex full ranger driver in a vareity of cabinets, this process served well to define the strengths and weaknesses of single driver speakers.

Between 100hz and 10khz, at reasonable volumes many of these things sound pretty darn good. As you stick them in various cabinets hunting for lower bass response you normally end up "swimming upstream" you may get your radio shack meter to read something at 50hz (or 30hz as some of these speakers peddlers claim) but real response drops off like a rock on my pair below 80hz.

In the model speaker you are looking at the Fostex chosen would not be my favorite. For 4" I would prefer the FX120 for about the same price, it seems to me to sound better balanced thoughout its frequency range, even the F107E at less than half the price of the F108E sounds better to me, less shouty.

I like the sound of single driver speakers, not for my main system however where I find they cannot load my room at the volumes I like to listen and do not really handle rock very well IMHO.

As with all speakers, auditioning with your music, ideally in your system in your own house, will be crucially important to making the right decision.

warm regards, tony

[Painful Reality]

Ole Tony!

You're always spot on in your description.

So I'll take the 2A3 PP amp I built you is really that good...

[codhead]

If you like the sound of Klipsch speakers, I think you'll be very

disappointed listening to a single driver Fostex variation. I have 2

pair of them. They sound very nice with female vocals and acoustic

guitar. Other than that, I'd prefer listening to a pair of Heresys with

a bad head cold.

[robster]

Thanks Codhead,

I like to listen to all types of music,my fortes are sounding a little bright in my small 11X9 istening room,crossovers are Dean G. modified which helped a lot,waiting on a pair of Mullard 12AT7's for my Blueberry that might help too. I ran across the Horn Shoppe speakers and thought they would work well in my small room. Just wanted some opionions.

Cheers,

Robert

[sunnysal]

One thing I will NEVER swap out of my system will be my PP 2A3 amp! tony

[Erik Mandaville]

Robert:

Haven't heard this particular speaker, but having used a sort of bigger brother to it by a different company -- the Lowther America Medallion II cabinet with Lowther drivers -- I am generally familiar with the species. The cabinet you mentioned is absolutely a horn-loaded design, just a small one, and for that reason will not be able to hit the same kind of lows you might be used to with your Klipsch speakers. I agree with Codhead on his take with the kind of music suited to this design. They are physically not able to negotiate very complex material, but can sound excellent within their limits. I still love the Lowthers for acoustic guitar, which we listen to often, but the K-horns are easily superior to them with the vast majority of music types. If you're interested in single driver designs, there are a few other things I know of that you might be interested in.

If you were contemplating the sale of your Klipsch speakers, it might be worth it to consider, if possible, auditioning the rear-loaded horns along side the Klipsch so you can have an idea of the differences between the two. If the Klipsch seem overly bright as you said, there are also things that can be done at the crossover level to help tame that.

Erik

[Erik Mandaville]

...add to the list of very capable reproduction of music -- acoustic/traditional jazz (not necessarily big-band, but maybe), chamber music, classical Baroque, certain lighter rock/pop, that sort of thing. Full symphonic music and other complex stuff does not do nearly as well.

[JBryan]

I've heard this speaker a few times and while it isn't going to shake the walls and the bass drops off pretty quickly @50Hz, the sound is really good and the imaging is wonderful.

Madisound.com sells the kit (BK-16) for @$650 and they're really easy to put together - even for 1st-time DIY'res. Some glue and clamps are really all you need (maybe a bit of patience too). These are best suited for a smallish room and with the right subwoofer, these could be great!

Have fun, Bryan

[JBryan]

Here's a blowup of the kit...

[TBrennan]

I heard the so-called "horn" (actually a direct-radiator over most of it's range) speaker in question and IMO it's a dismal speaker with a tonal balance so skewed to the midrange as to make a Heresy sound like an AR-3. Dynamics were about what one would expect from a pair of TV speakers.

Note too that the so-called "basshorn" has a mouth about the size of an Altec 511 midrange horn.

IMO the best way to use these so-called "fullrange" drivers is to mount them in open baffles and augment them with a sub, I've heard such systems sound pretty good. These ridiculous undersized rear-horns often used with them do nothing except to let the owners say they use "horns".

While I think that some Fostex drivers sound good others sound dreadful. The best I've heard is the FX-200 which is a low efficiency design.

[jt1stcav]

I agree with Erik...don't get rid of your horn-loaded Klipsch just yet.

I now own a pair of Loth-X Amaze single-driver bookshelf monitors (Loth-X Audio is now defunkt), with their crossoverless 6" Fostex tri-coned paper driver. Frequency response is 55Hz - 20kHz with an efficiency rating of 96dB @ 1W/1M at 8 ohms, so they're a perfect match for my 8 watt 300B SET power amp. Bass response is adequate for voice, violin, and acoustic guitar, but for large scale orchestral and pipe organ music, you will need a subwoofer (which I hope to buy for myself soon). Midrange frequencies are perfectly reproduced with this chemically treated paper cone, but the highs aren't quite as crisp (I suspect there's a major dropoff well before the manufacturer's 20kHz rating...maybe between 12 to 15kHz...). Don't get me wrong, cymbals still shimmer naturally, they're just not as defined as cymbals reproduced on the horn tweeters on my Cornwalls.

I don't know if I totally agree that single-driver loudspeakers aren't capable of fully negotiating very complex material. Granted, IMO maybe some much larger Abby, Omega, and Lowther single-drivers have a harder time of it, especially with tiny flea-powered SET amps. But in my limited experience with my smaller Amaze bookshelf monitors and my more powerful 300B amp, I'm fully able to ascertain complex musical passages, whether it be fast Baroque organ counterpoint to grande tutti French Romantic organ symphonies, with all their various voices at extreme pitch and intensity carefully played out in all their glory. I can distinctly hear the rasp of the organ's reeds as they vibrate within the pipe's boots (some pipes/notes rasp more than others); the clarity of the mutation stops that sometimes almost sound bell-like the higher the notes get; the individual "chiff" one hears before the actual note of the Baroque flute ranks fills with air and speaks its individual pitch; the rich harmonic tonality from the lowest 32' pedal bass notes (minus the lack of actual bass content below 55Hz, the harmonic structures are still there at the higher midbass frequencies)...IMO maybe a single, crossoverless driver has a harder time reproducing complex material due to trying to play back a full range of frequencies. But my Amaze 6" driver is tri-coned, so each of its 3 "cones" within a single cone reproduce their own specific frequency range (a single 3-way driver, with the main cone creating the midbass, the whizzer creating the midrange, and a metal ring just around the pointed centrally located alloy phase plug creating all the high frequencies). I dunno...I'm no engineer, but that's my take on the situation.

I do find at times the Amaze can sound a little honky at higher levels...maybe it's related to certain recorded material, I don't hear it all the time. But just like a horn can sometimes screech and sound shrill, maybe single-driver cones can honk at certain times. There is no perfect driver IMO, whether it's horn, cone, dome, or planar...you just accept what sounds best to your ears and learn to live with their idiosyncrasies. You may find your horn-loaded Klipsch sound better for certain material than a single-driver can, and vise-versa, especially with certain components and room size. I plan on using my Cornwalls again when I can relocate my system to a much larger room; in the meantime, my bookshelf Loth-X Amaze work extremely well in my present tiny room...once I can purchase a decent subwoofer, I'll be totally content with my system's performance.

[codhead]

Here's an internal view of my little Hasehiro MM151S horns. They're

built very well, being CNC machined from some pretty thick MDF. Don't

know the degree to which it affects the sound, but the "horn" seems to

be a lot more precise than a large plywood box.

I like Tom's comment "Dynamics were about what one would expect from a

pair of TV speakers." A lot of you may think that sounds pretty harsh,

but I've yet to be impressed with the reproduction of any music that

involved amplification in it's original form. Even light jazz like

Acoustic Alchemy sounds pretty "pinched" compared with the Heresy.

As far as imaging goes, on the right music these have it in spades. But

by the time you start adding tweeters (I have the Fostex T90A's) and a

sub to make them perform better on a wider range of music, you've

pretty much killed the advantages of a single driver.

They're certainly fun to play with, but I sure would not recommend them

to anyone as their only pair of speakers. Out of hundreds of CD's that

I own, there are only a few that I would characterize as sounding good

on these speakers. But for those that do, they sound very good.

[oscarsear]

This question addresses the issue raised in my post about using a cone driven speaker for just the mid-range in a Khorn. Of course all of these are full range single speaker horns that run without cross-overs. In my mid-range search these are abundant. Supra-vox in France, Manger in Germany and many off shoots like the Cain & Cain set-ups.

So what these show is that a single reasonably well built cone speaker can produce good quality sound in the 50 to 15KHz range. The Khorn AK-4 crosses at 450 and 4.5KHz dead on in the meaty range for these smallish cone speakers. The compression speakers do not re-produce the upper bass region well where a big part of the music is.

So y'all can I pluck just the meaty mid-range performance from one of these full range dynamos and get solid performance and good imaging or am I missing something that only a compression driver can offer????

[oscarsear]

I agree with Erik...don't get rid of your horn-loaded Klipsch just yet.

I now own a pair of Loth-X Amaze single-driver bookshelf monitors (Loth-X Audio is now defunkt), with their crossoverless 6" Fostex tri-coned paper driver. Frequency response is 55Hz - 20kHz with an efficiency rating of 96dB @ 1W/1M at 8 ohms, so they're a perfect match for my 8 watt 300B SET power amp. Bass response is adequate for voice, violin, and acoustic guitar, but for large scale orchestral and pipe organ music, you will need a subwoofer (which I hope to buy for myself soon). Midrange frequencies are perfectly reproduced with this chemically treated paper cone, but the highs aren't quite as crisp (I suspect there's a major dropoff well before the manufacturer's 20kHz rating...maybe between 12 to 15kHz...). Don't get me wrong, cymbals still shimmer naturally, they're just not as defined as cymbals reproduced on the horn tweeters on my Cornwalls.

I don't know if I totally agree that single-driver loudspeakers aren't capable of fully negotiating very complex material. Granted, IMO maybe some much larger Abby, Omega, and Lowther single-drivers have a harder time of it, especially with tiny flea-powered SET amps. But in my limited experience with my smaller Amaze bookshelf monitors and my more powerful 300B amp, I'm fully able to ascertain complex musical passages, whether it be fast Baroque organ counterpoint to grande tutti French Romantic organ symphonies, with all their various voices at extreme pitch and intensity carefully played out in all their glory. I can distinctly hear the rasp of the organ's reeds as they vibrate within the pipe's boots (some pipes/notes rasp more than others); the clarity of the mutation stops that sometimes almost sound bell-like the higher the notes get; the individual "chiff" one hears before the actual note of the Baroque flute ranks fills with air and speaks its individual pitch; the rich harmonic tonality from the lowest 32' pedal bass notes (minus the lack of actual bass content below 55Hz, the harmonic structures are still there at the higher midbass frequencies)...IMO maybe a single, crossoverless driver has a harder time reproducing complex material due to trying to play back a full range of frequencies. But my Amaze 6" driver is tri-coned, so each of its 3 "cones" within a single cone reproduce their own specific frequency range (a single 3-way driver, with the main cone creating the midbass, the whizzer creating the midrange, and a metal ring just around the pointed centrally located alloy phase plug creating all the high frequencies). I dunno...I'm no engineer, but that's my take on the situation.

I do find at times the Amaze can sound a little honky at higher levels...maybe it's related to certain recorded material, I don't hear it all the time. But just like a horn can sometimes screech and sound shrill, maybe single-driver cones can honk at certain times. There is no perfect driver IMO, whether it's horn, cone, dome, or planar...you just accept what sounds best to your ears and learn to live with their idiosyncrasies. You may find your horn-loaded Klipsch sound better for certain material than a single-driver can, and vise-versa, especially with certain components and room size. I plan on using my Cornwalls again when I can relocate my system to a much larger room; in the meantime, my bookshelf Loth-X Amaze work extremely well in my present tiny room...once I can purchase a decent subwoofer, I'll be totally content with my system's performance.

=====================================================

Loth X can still be found. The "Amaze" bookshelf speaker technology is now incorporated N2 their floorstanding "Ambience" speakers. Again their entire line uses single full range speakers without crossovers. They distribute and sell direct out of OSS in Toluca Lake, Cal.

[TBrennan]

"So what these show is that a single reasonably well built cone speaker can produce good quality sound in the 50 to 15KHz range."

Well not really, 100 to 10,000 is more like it though you can raise or lower one as long as you raise or lower the other in the same direction. Note that the strong magnets that will allow a driver to overcome inertia and make decent highs also also overdamp the bass and lead to a high f3. This is the very reason that Voight and Chave designed rearhorns for their Lowther drivers; to try to elevate the bass up to the level of the direct-radiating midrange. I call it horn-loading in self-defense and it still doesn't work well unless the horn is very large, certainly larger than the Medallion and Hedlund rear-horns I've often heard.

Good lows or good highs, take your pick, you can't have both from one driver.

Now as to whether a GOOD cone will sound as good as a compression driver-horn in the mids is a question of preference that you can only answer for yourself. Give it a go and see what you think. B&C makes a nice neo-magnet high-efficiency high output 10" that a pal is using as a midrange in a mono system with an Altec tweeter and an 18" woofer and it sounds pretty good.

[Mark Hardy]

TQWT's are pretty nice...

http://www.geocities.com/rbrines1/