The Frugel-Horn Project

[Ronmeister]

Originally Posted by planet10

Look familiar?



http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/newre...te=1&p=1918491

5 items down as of this posting.

Could a Croatian member contact these guys in their native language and get more info?

dave

Dave, do you still require assistance? Though not Croatian, I can assist, just let me know or PM me.

[planet10]

We would love to have someone not directly inquire.

If it is derived directly from Frugel-Horn it is a compliment, but we always like to ensure that Martin's sheets are properly licenced and a link back to the original source.

BTW i never posted the image from the gallery from Croatia.



dave

[yoshisoakland]

Hi all,

First of all thanks to planet10 and everyone else for all the work put into the Frugel horn site.
After the rave reviews of the horn shoppe I built my own Frugels (actually I cheated and had the enclusure made for me - too little time for woodworking). Now after two months of listening to the Frugel horns driven by a Miniwatt SET tube amp I come to the following conclusion.





It is the best speaker I have ever owned - but that is because I only owned really bad speakers before. It does have some lower midrange peaks which are not great and the bass is lacking (see also posts by justaguy). I have also read that the horn shoppe is lacking bass (you can only expect so much from a small diameter driver even with a transmission line /horn in the back), but I think that the lower midrange peakiness of the Frugel is probably worse than the horn shoppe - otherwise I do not think it would have gotten such great reviews (even though a lot of the horn shoppe may be hype). By the way, the corner placement of the above picture is not what I use now - both speakers now have a nice corner and are around 25 cm from back and side wall.

In the meantime I have found a way to correct the Frugel problems with digital room correction (blogohl: Align) after buying a measurement microphone and an ECM sound card. Below you see the uncorrected frequency response of my frugels (green) and the much better corrected one (blue, drc profile 'normal'). After the correction the sound is quite nice, but you have to be a bit careful because you cannot play too loud before xmax of the Fostes Fe126En (not the enabled one but the En series from Fostex) is reached.



I would appreciate any comments on how the frequency response of the Frugel could be improved by mechanical means (damping etc.) because that would enable me to use not only the drc corrected sound from a USB dac at my laptop but also my turntable. All in all I think that the Frugel project is lacking a bit of hard measurement data, and I think that with more measurements also ideas for an improved sound might be found. Measurements of course cannot replace critical listening, but it can help with understanding the sound. A great website I have recently started to read is Linkwitz Lab - Loudspeaker Design where Mr. Linkwitz has found a very nice balance of understanding the basic physics and applying the findings.

While there has not been much activity in this thread recently I hope that in the spirit of open source development one could either improve the Frugel or advice DIY builders to build a different better design. I think that the backloaded horn design is a very clever idea, because all the deep frequency sound waves which would create problems / reflections in a box loudspeaker because they cannot be absorbed by stuffing are put to good use in enhancing the bass response.

I have certainly learned a lot while playing with the horns and have a lot of fun with the drc corrected sound.

Best regards,
S.

[planet10]

I might be of interest to all that we aquired a pair of Hornshoppe horns and had a number of people over to do some (single) blind listening tests.

We had FH Level 0, the modified Buschhorn Mk 1, and the Ed Horns. All equipped with FE126eN.

The Ed Horn edged out the B-Horn (part of that could have been down to fresh 126eN in the B-Horn vrs a set that had 100s & 100s of hours on them.

The FH was clearly ahead of the Ed Horn, being more open, less boxy, and better bass amoungst other things.

As to measures, everything below ~300 Hz is going to be room dominated, and in the words of Ed Schilling "if you move the mic inches one way or the other, you'll get something different"

The measurements that have been done have led to consideration of FH Mk II, the demise of FE126e, and the new FE126En means time to start over again.

dave

[yoshisoakland]

Hi Dave,

thank you very much for the quick reply. It is good to know that the Frugel Horn fares well against the original Horn - that comparison makes me feel much better about the decision to use the DIY approach with your design (international shipping from the US and a hefty 25% customs fee make the Horn quite expensive here in Germany). Very interesting blind test!

The new model Fostex Fe126En seems to be a good replacement for the old Fe126E, at least a comparison by the guys at PJN-Audio - Hornlautsprecher Gehäuse für Fostex, Lowther showed similar behavior apart from a slight improvement of the peak at 6500 Hz. I do not know how thorough their tests are though.

You are right about the dominance of room modes below 300 Hz, the Frugel Horn sounded a bit better in a large room, but I since moved to a smaller flat the current room gives me the above response. While the exact frequency graph indeed changes when you move the microphone, the 110 Hz and 220 Hz peaks are always there as the backloaded horn really boosts those frequencies. But I guess that this is just an intrinsic property of the backloaded horn. I will play a bit more with changing things in my room, and luckily digital room correction really works, I highly recommend it if you are using a computer as music source. - By the way: are there any designs around which are specifically intended for digital correction? DRC reduces the design difficulty by allowing for an uneven frequency response to be digitally corrected, so potentially a cheaper driver or simpler design would be possible as long as there is enough bass and treble extension, as well as enough sound output (some 10 dB output are lost in the drc correction).

Thanks again for your great work Dave!
S.

[planet10]

New Thread here

dave