Round Acoustic Loading Horns (JMLC, SWH, Traktrix, etc.) – the Trumpets of Jericho?

Sometimes a slightly provocative headline is necessary to attract attention. Please don’t take it too seriously. But it should be well known that the origin of my activities regarding horn development was dissatisfaction with these types of horns. Personally, I just couldn’t live with the fact that these horns consistently focus the sound extremely narrowly (beaming). There is more or less a very small sweet spot where you can experience the full spectrum of the music. If you move away from the sweet spot, the sound image collapse very quickly. What I have also noticed repeatedly as a negative aspect is that the on-axis listening experience is often very direct, tiring, or even annoying in the high-frequency range. As always, perception is subjective, and it may well be that there are people who explicitly like this. It is important to me to emphasize that I am not claiming that my opinion is the only valid one. Nevertheless, in this article, I would like to describe and also demonstrate with help of a BEM simulation why I have come to this conclusion and why I consider these horn types to be obsolete. Continue reading

Consistent Modification of the Spherical Wave Horn

This post will be slightly different because it was written in German. German is the language of the original patents used and the main references of the literature used. Alone, to use the original terminology directly and pay homage to the inventors, I have decided to use the German language as a consistent continuation. I think that nowadays it is no longer an obstacle not to publish in English as powerful algorithms for automatic translation are available. For the captions, however, I have used English for the sake of simplicity. Continue reading