NCcrashman wrote:Killer replies. I told him several things, but the number one item I told him, was basically this. Horn loaded enclosures are amazingly efficient, sound great and very musical. That was his primary concern. Based on how efficient they really are, those power amp companies would go out of business not being able to sell high power amps. I can't remember if it was the VXR or the Peavey, but their dual 18" sub takes something ridiculous like 4800 watt's. Plus, they cost a ton of labor to manufacture and like Bruce said, how tough is it to cut a couple holes and glue speakers in them? We were looking at numbers like SPL chart's and he said it doesn't represent anything except how loud they can go. Not how nice they sound. That being said, he meant zero disrespect to Bill or his designs. He was just saying horn loaded box's in general. He is actually a pretty killer dude. He was asking legitimate questions looking for legitimate answers. He was implying that horns were popular in the 80's and not today. I took him to some websites and showed him some speaker array's that would be used in a stadium. Guess what? They were horns. He's a believer. Plus, when I'm done, I'll shut him up for good
Nice chat gang,
Patrick
You sort of hit upon it, but one other thing to bear in mind on the consumer/prosumer bias against horns:
When you have companies like Harman International that are mega-conglomerates with a slew of brands under their umbrella (AKG®, BSS®, Crown®, dbx®, DigiTech®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL® - Consumer, JBL® - Professional, Lexicon® - Consumer, Lexicon® - Professional, Mark Levinson®, Revel®, Soundcraft®, Studer®) it makes sense to consider that the different brands would not work at cross-purposes. If you look at the big picture it only makes sense that JBL would continue to put out simple, inefficient boxes loaded with drivers that can handle more and more power, when another arm of the same conglomerate is Crown, who keeps coming out with amplifiers that can produce more and more power to feed those inefficient speakers. I'm not saying it's like that across the board, but it's the big companies that tend to dictate the direction the market moves in.
It's like what would happen if a computer software companies (Windows? Adobe?) were in cahoots with the computer hardware companies (Dell? HP?) and kept coming up with updates to their software that arbitrarily required more and more resources, just to help the hardware companies sell bigger/faster computers.... But we all know that would never happen.
