Are Horn Speakers good or bad or simply a complete joke?

I heard many horn speakers and I can say they're all joke EXCEPT Avantgarde, but they consider to be not full-horn speakers except Trios that cost $50k at least, but even with no woofers go down to 32hz flat.
Blw, you might not believe but you can adjust the stage so they will not be so immediate. For example you can schuffle arround with placement of midrange and tweeter, you can bend it backwards or forward, you can adjust the crossover depending on what amp you're dealing with. Despite for their ultra-high efficiency they still neet to be driven with preferably >=15W/ch amp in order to comply with woofer amp. It does take a good half of year to set them up to your perfection but I tend to believe to manufacturer about their precision of music they're designed for.

I just bought a pair of Altec 886A's for $75.00. hooked em up the other night WOW. I geta Hard-On when I listen to them.

speakers are the most flawed part of a system. no matter what speaker you use almost, if you have a good front end and amp you will get at least reasonable sound. single-ended amps are the best sounding amps something like using a crossoverless speaker. there is a certain purity to them that a speaker as critical as a horn requires for best sound. the idea that one uses a horn speaker only because of their sensitivity to play their low powered se amp is just wrong. horns deisgned to give a semi-spherical wave form (like avantgarde and others)combined with their inherent low distortion are theoretically the ultimate way to go. horns with well damped flares will have low coloration to boot.

I'm going to hang on to my Realistic Mach 1's! I've seriously wondered if there was something I could do with these to reach the sonic level previous members have shared. Any suggestions or are these a joke?

It's an old thread, but I don't care...

I love the sound of horn speakers. My purchase in 1975 of a pair of Altec 846 B Valencias is the best $600 bucks I ever spent.

So very efficient and yet so powerful. The punch, the clarity, and the dynamic range cannot be described. And now that I'm beyond my heavy metal days, they are even more amazing to me now that I've rediscovered how great they sound at low volume levels.