Recently, I was involved in a private discussion with a guy who introduced himself as expert for home cinema setups. The topic was about a horn that could be used for a really large home cinema setup. Not what many would imagine immediately like a small room for 2-3 people. No, truly large for 10 or more people and the listening rows / seats have a third dimension in the vertical direction the more far away they are from the source. For such a setup, the horn should have very good directivity control. The person tirelessly promoted the TAD TH4003 as the ultimate solution for such setups. At that time I only knew the TH4003 horn from some pictures. But over the last years I have developed an eye for whether a horn profile meets certain requirements or not. That’s why I expressed my biggest concerns about the vertical pattern control of the TH4003. However, since I had no mesh file or STEP file of the TH4003 available at the time, no final assessment could be made. The discussion then more or less fizzled out. Some months later, a STEP file for TH4003. A few months later, a STEP file literally “fell off the back of a pssing truck” ;-), which gave me the opportunity to examine the horn more closely. I also remembered one of my first William Neile waveguides and the experiments with gentle diffraction slots and realized that I actually already had something much better in the drawer.
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The first Making of a William Neile ALO SE Horn
Some time ago I presented the first article about my development of the ALO William Neile horn type and the underlying construction method. Although, most of my previous worksheets use a super ellipse for each 3D layer / spline along the horn axis. To have an alternative option for William Neile horns I have implemented the the necessary math together with evenly distributed Neile parabolas used in this context to build up the horizontal construction wave front. All William Neile (WN) horns based on the super ellipse algorithm will get the extension “SE” in their name.
By varying the Lamé exponent of the super ellipse formula many different shapes from elliptical to almost rectangular are possible. At throat everything always starts with a Lamé exponent of 2 which indicates an ideal ellipse. Of course, if major and minor axis of the ellipse are equal there will results a perfect circle at throat. If major and minor axis differ an ellipse will result. Generally, the major axis is the horizontal plane because it is intended to radiate more broad compared to the vertical plane (minor axis). For higher Lamé exponents of the super ellipse formula the resulting shape will be an almost rectangular spline but a transition function is needed to provide a smooth transition from exponent 2 to higher values along the horn axis. A very similar procedure was already used for my spherical wave horn (SWH) and JMLC worksheets.
This article is about the first making of such a horn by DonVK who much preferred the native elliptical shape and asked for my assistance to optimize a horn for his setup. Finally, we ended by with two horn of different cut-off. This article describes the making of the first smaller version.
Acoustic Loading Optimized William Neile Horns – Part 2
The second part of this article series deals with 1in4 (1.4 inch) William Neile ALO horn. This is the next logical step on my agenda. Also because the new 1in4 William Neile ALO horn is supposed to replace my current TH4001 which is a good sounding horn so the expectations are set quite high. The category of the so-called fin horns seems to me to be quite popular and their good sound properties are usually reported. However, I am of the opinion that the known underlying assumption for the construction of fin horns, especially the fin shape and arrangement, does not lead to a coherent wavefront over all frequencies at the exit of the individual channels. I have developed an improved version of different curved fin arrangement which implements equal path lengths of each channel together with the right and exact opening angle for proper exponential acoustic loading, but this is another story. So to speak the TH4001 is a good performer but has some serious design issues. The William Neile ALO horns use what I call natural dispersion instead but with it’s own limits one has to accept. What I want to say is that it is not possible to achieve such wide radiation for a very low-loading horn similar to a fin horn. In my opinion, this is not necessary at all for use in normal listening rooms. But many are somehow still of the opinion that some kind of cinema horns with extremely wide dispersion should be set up at home but these were intended to reach hundreds of people in a large cinema hall with evenly distributed sound impressions at every single seat. A slightly narrower dispersion can definitely be an advantage, especially in smaller listening rooms and when only a few listening positions in the room have to be considered. The intrinsic problems of fin horns, which are related to the the individual channels (shape, length, arrangement), such as cavity resonances or excitations or the suboptimal addition to a coherent wave front, cannot occur with a natural dispersion horn. For example, anyone who doubts that e.g. 30 degrees of even radiation can be sufficient should mark this angle with two strings on the floor from each loudspeaker to the listening position and preferably with the loudspeakers angled slightly inwards and then look at the area of even radiation delimited by the strings on the floor. My 1in4 William Neile ALO horn will achieve about twice as wide dispersion in the horizontal plane.