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
Tag Archives: round
Ellipsoidal Wave Fronts in Horns
As you might already guess by the name of this website, the spherical wave horn inspired my work a lot. If we assume expanding spherical wave fronts in round horns and want to stretch the round profile to an ellipse then we must inevitably think about ellipsoidal surface areas and of course the associated mathematics. My own learning phase was not easy either, until I found myself able to mathematically master the challenge. I will describe the results of my work in this post and try to give as many details as possible and describe as much math as necessary. The whole stuff is quite complicated and therefore we will simply start with the two-dimensional part and then gradually come to the ellipsoidal surfaces.
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A Normalized Stereographic Projection for Spherical Horns
I will continue now with a topic that seems not obviously related to horns. During my research about the spherical wave horn the first goal was to stretch the round profile into an elliptical one. More about this in a forthcoming post. Although it should be a good idea to break the symmetry, most horns on the market still have a flat mouth. If we have a look at the ellipse we have a major and a minor axis. The minor axis is generally orientated in the vertical axis of the horn mouth, thus having less mouth diameter than the horizontal axis. The same holds for any rectangle flat mouth horn and if we find a datasheet we generally observe that for low frequencies the vertical control is not the same as for the horizontal plane. The LF beaming starts earlier for the vertical direction because of less mouth diameter. Next to the mouth diameter, the horn length is another important property with respect to loading. But to achieve a better loading for a more balanced pattern control the horn length must become longer for the walls near to the minor axis and shorter near to the major axis. For a long time I had no reasonable idea how to do such a transformation until I came across with a projection procedure that is used to generate a world map. This procedure is called stereographic projection (Ref. 1, Ref. 2)