Why not horns?

I am planning on testing the Faital pro 2" compression driver in a horn in the next few weeks. The Faital driver is considered the best compression driver that US Speaker sells (according to Al, the owner of usspeaker) with a very flat response 500hz-18khz and ultra low distortion. It will be crossed over with an active 48dB slope to my 18" drivers, which will handle below 500hz (and they do so QUITE well).

They will be good competition for my 15" Audio Nirvana Full-Range drivers, which I found to be some of the best speakers I've ever heard regardless of price.

My system is a high-resolution DSP-based system with amplification of my own design. If the horns are distorting I'll know it right off the bat.

I'll post back with my findings once I get around to putting this project together.

I only received half of my order (only one driver) so I'm waiting on the other Faital Pro HF20AT driver. That being said, this single driver in mono sounds the most like real music of any speaker I've ever heard regardless of price.

I have it attached to my active XO crossing over at 500hz. The sound is incredibly clear and uncompressed. Even from a single speaker in mono the speaker totally disappears and sounds 20x its size. I am like a kid at christmas waiting for the second driver to arrive. Couldn't be more thrilled with this driver -- then again it's the most expensive CD on the market.

I have heard of ALE. Though $76k for a pair of drivers is a bit over my budget. And those aren't as high bandwidth. The Faital drivers (got my second one today) sound great down to about 350hz with a 48dB XO filter. I don't think there are any CHDs on the market that go this low with as flat a response. Sounds fantastic. Though it's showing me how much of a bad link my 18" drivers are.

I'm debating about building an open baffle bass set up, but putting the open baffle in the corners of the room... that effectively turns the entire room into a bass horn. Might be interesting to try at some point.

I placed my AN15s back in my system and paired them with the Faital driver. The 18s DEFINITELY can't handle above 100hz. They're awesome subs for certain, but midbass is not their forte. The AN15s totally trounce them in terms of naturalness and speed of the midbass. Much less edgy and far more effortless and uncompressed. I'll potentially build a set of amps for the subs and use them for below 100hZ. Or maybe I'll just sell them because I'm fairly happy with the AN15s until the Alnico version comes out. The 18s are monsters though, really great subs, just don't know if I need them at the moment.

The FP driver is stellar though. I ran some tests on fuzzmeasure and it's EXTREMELY low distortion across its frequency band down to about 400hz. It's about -70dB compared to the last compression driver (a B&C driver) I tested, which was up at -50dB harmonic distortion. The neat thing is the FP driver's 2nd and third harmonic distortion graphs are identically low. Proof is in the listening -- sounds fantastic.