opinions on modern horn speakers

Richardmr,vons are great speakers and sensitivity is one of the best ways to get great sound .Right now Iam building a 100db speaker based on a ribbon tweeter and PHL mids and woofers .Prototype sounds great, woofers will be 100db so all will run on 1 amp.Will cost arround $2500 just for parts and build so retail would be arround $4000,So vons not so far off on the price on the DB100S after all .Have you tried a 300b set or 845 ,They would run your speaker fine [depending on room size] .And sound better in the mids than a push pull.Take care and happy listening

My horns sound great on all music no need to switch .I have a friend who wants to trade his avolon edilons for my horns thought about it but I would sell the edilon to build a new pair so...

BD DESIGNS WEB SITE ,The pics are under John Kalinowsky first pic .They do look better in person.Thanks for the responces .JK

If you are near Ohio, you might want to try attending the Midwest AudioFest in Lima, OH which seems to be held each year in the spring. There are lots of horns and high sensitivity/efficiency systems on display there. Then you can draw your own conclusions. I went this spring. I have been wondering about these types of designs for a while. I would seem that many audiophiles start out with dynamic box speakers or planars but end up (later in life) turning to horns and SETs. I had wondered if that was perhaps because of one of two things.

1. They know something that I don't.
2. They have become senile.

My impression of most of the horn (and compression horn) designs is that -

1. There is no sound stage
2. Many of the systems will try to split your skull open
3. I still prefer planars.

Except for the Omega room and the Venus HiFi room I did not like any of the systems on display. Both of these two rooms used single driver speakers with the fostex drivers. The latter was the Cain & Cain "Abbey" using a Voigt pipe design driven by an Audio note integrated 300B amp (M3 ??) and a Audiomeca Obsession (?) CD player. but you mileagemay vary. And I encourage you to see for youself even if I did not care for them.

over 99% of all music recorded from 1960 through today was(and is) played back, mixed,and mastered using push pull amplification and conventional dynamic drivers. the idea of an artist, engineer or producer spending hour,days,and weeks listening to music through a horn, powered by a 3 watt amp is always going to be something best left to a faction of audiofiles seaching for musical enjoyment...and theres certainly nothing wrong with that.