Why not horns?

There is a saying in Zen,

If you are off by an inch, you are off by a million miles.

This particularly applies to horn loudspeakers.

Horn speaker design is either on, or its not, and if its not on, by virtue of its greater dynamics and higher overall efficiency, horn speakers which are not well designed (most) are rather more awful than their direct radiator brethren.

The conical horns you are now enjoying and find worth remarking on are a notable deviation from everything that has come before in commercial horn design. It's not something that people on Audiogon will be likely to discern, but I am glad that this thread may bring horn speakers to the attention of a larger public on this site.

Jonathan Weiss
Oswaldsmill Audio (OMA)

I've been watching this thread with a good deal of amusement. I don't think many people here have any idea of what horns can be. It's that simple. So here is the Disclaimer- my company, OMA, manufactures conical horn based systems which are created by the same designer Bill Woods, as the thread author MacroJack uses.

These horns are, to put it bluntly, unlike any horns which have been on the hifi market over the last 50 years. They were never used for hifi, and also never used for theater systems, as they required a larger horn for the same flare cutoff frequency. No company in the world, besides OMA, uses a conical flare profile horn in their speaker product for hifi, and thus no one on this thread is going to be able to make a useful judgement about the sound of such horns until they actually hear them. I will admit that Duke of AudioKinesis makes a very similar product, which I like alot, and I consider Duke a fellow traveller. But outside of that tiny circle, whatever you think of horns is pretty useless, as you are thinking of a different animal entirely.

Many of you may be thinking, that's not fair. How can I make up my mind if I can't hear these things? I'll make that easy- OMA has a new, NYC Showroom in Soho, Manhattan, right at the corner of Broadway and Houston, and you can compare this kind of horn system to the top of the line ATC speaker, the EL150 SLP, which is about $60,000, depending on exchange rates, and also hear the only Wadia System 9 in the NYC Metro area.

Our most recent clients have mainly been musicians- Ben Folds, Phil Palombi, and the mastering engineer Andreas Meyer. The cellist Lorie Singer came in recently to the Soho Showroom, and I played her the Bach Cello lp's from Mercury with Starker. She called me up the next day, to tell me that she had been a student of Starker, and that for the first time in her life, she heard cello reproduced properly, and that she actually felt Starker in the room.

This does not happen with direct radiator speakers. It does not happen with planars either, nor electrostats.

Jonathan Weiss
Oswaldsmill Audio