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: tractrix
A True Expansion Tractrix Horn
During my research about the spherical wave horn I also played around with the tractrix profile. While investigating the wave font expansion of the spherical wave horn I came up with the idea to investigate the same expansion for the tractrix horn and how far the surface area of the propagating wave front follows the exponential expansion coefficient m:
\tag{1}m = \dfrac{4\pi \cdot f_c}{c_s}
\tag{2}S_{exp}(x) = S_0 \cdot e^{m \cdot x}
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Just another HiFi blog?
Rather not. This blog is intended to give my work on horns a suitable frame and to present information in a coherent form.
I remember very well my first experiences with horn loudspeakers and was fascinated by their sound from the first moment on. These experiences were based on the visit of various HiFi shows or special demonstrations. Inevitably one meets also the usual representatives of round horns, i.e. Tractrix, JMLC or similar/equal to Klangfilms spherical wave horn (Kugelwellenhorn). An awesome and almost comprehensive overview about the Kugelwellenhorn can be found here: Ref. 1.