Attention Horn Owners

With the modded Khorns hard pinned info really extends into room, but at the same time I have a wonderfully deep center sound stage which can also extend out into room. I've had narrow baffle box loudspeakers in the past which made speaker disappear, with the large Khorns this really not possible. One of the great benefits of my mods is that I've been able to achieve much better time alignment of drivers. With the free standing mid horn and tweeter I can set tweeter baffle back from front face of speaker, result is high freq much more in balance with mids, when Khorns were stock sound stage was much more in your face and hot. I can also toe in or out both mid driver and tweeter without disturbing the corner placement/seal which is required for the folded horn to perform best.

No doubt horn material matters greatly, far more natural sounding vs. plastic or the metal mid my Khorns originally had. Shape of horn also matters in that it directs the sound, tractrix far superior to exponential. 

Finally, in order to achieve a more refined or natural sound quality from horns a quality crossover is required, using quality caps, inductors, resistors if used and wire can go a long way in achieving this. 

As for amps, pre's, I think SET is great match for most high efficiency horns although push pulls can be very nice as well. SET may be more immediate/up front but the lovely 300B with no negative feedback and it's even order harmonic distortion is sublime.

Meant to say wood horns.

Depending on your budget Klipsch heritage series work well with tubes. I’m using Rogue Cronus Magnum III with Cornwall IVs, very good match. 

@toddalin 

Best they have ever heard?

They haven’t heard mine, 😂!

Then again, I’d never make such a claim about a particular component, only about a system.  Each component functions within the context of the system within which it resides. Weakest link rules. 

See the about page theaudioatticvinylsundays.com

I like the Klipsch heritage speakers even though they don't come close to some custom systems using truly great vintage compression drivers.  Drivers of this quality haven't been made since the 1960's.  Klipsch makes do with what one can find of modern drivers at modest prices.  Likewise Volti, and I like what Volti does even more with modern drivers. 

But, for my taste, a truly great horn has to use some of the old compression drivers and horns.  This weekend, I heard a just finished custom speaker that utilizes a Western Electric 713A driver and a Japanese horn from the 1950-60 era.  The woofers and tweeter are modern, the crossover is new, but filled with vintage parts.  The internal wiring is, I believe 1940-50 Western Electric wire.  The crossover point is lower than the original Western Electric specification, but, the builder said that because this speaker is not being used as the sole speaker in a theater (original use of the driver), it can be pushed down a little.  The sound was fantastic--a surprising amount of detail and texture to instrumental sounds came through without the sound being thin and harsh like some other "detailed" speaker.  It had all of the other characteristics of a good horn, except for the enormous sense of "scale" that one only gets with truly enormous speakers (these were quite compact by horn speaker standards); still they are better than most in this respect as well.