Horn Speaker Recommendations

kornhent,

Those are very interesting looking systems.  I noticed that some of the pictures look like Onken bass reflex cabinets for the woofers (I like Onkens).  It is good to see builders making serious modern, but old school, systems.  What drivers do your horns work with (what diameter, thread, etc.)?  What drivers do you use?  


willgolf,

Given your aesthetic requirements, my guess is that the Avantgarde Duo is a serious candidate.  It sounds pretty and will work in your space and works with low power amps (I see low-powered tube amps in your future).

Klipschorns.

Because they are the best sounding speakers I have ever heard, and because they were basically the best thing that Klipsch was able to design after about 10 years of research, in 1948 - and to this day, beyond the life of it's original designer, they don't seem to have come up with anything better. Are there other speakers that are better? Perhaps.  I have indeed heard other speakers that sound really good, but those weren't better, just different, and many of them were over $100k. It may sound like a boring obvious suggestion, but Klispchorns are spectacular, even if they aren't rare. Horn or not, Klipschorns are in the top tier in my opinion.

Larryi,
I love experiences around old and new ideas. I always want to know if old solutions are very good solutions or just...old habits :-)
My own experiences about bass are here :
https://www.latelierdumicrophone.fr/bloglast articles  are in english/french, older articles in french only.i will take some time, a day, to write about the particular two 15" bass horn we used on the first model of the Grande Castine horn speaker.

Rolling pictures of KornHent.bzh are from customers, most of them are old, coming from the first period i sold horns ( in early 2000's)
I love small Onken with Altec 414. Not at all the Onken W for several reasons (it is probably not the good thread to talk about that :-D )

for Larryi again !
i use actually BMS 4596 medium (no coaxial). Very natural, No distorsion even at low frequency and high level. I prefer it over Beyma 850ND and Radian 950 i used formerly.Moreover, it is easy to make a crossover with this BMS : there is a natural rolloff at 3000Hz.
The new Celestion Axi2050 is probably another good solution.
for the treeble i love the cheap B&CDE120 and the Faital pro HF108R
for the bass it is a custom made 12", by Cyrille Pinton. i was not able to find the 12" i need in actual products !

If i had a 40k budget would definitely be the JBL dd67000 . JBLs in the 3k range will compete with anything for that matter. I am a fan of horns but you have to have gear that allows adjustment along with practical experience with crossovers . Horns will effortlessly knock your socks off. But, with that comes very fine adjustments . You have to do alot of listening and tweeking to get them right, but once you do there is nothing like it.