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.

Continue reading →