Which horn project to choose?

[Defo]

The last couple of months I have been brainstorming quite a lot about what my next speaker project will be. I knew it would be horns, preferably big ones... and high efficiency in general. I'm also curious about open baffles. Out of all this I have made up four designs which I cant seem to make up my decision about... So it would be great if someone could point me in one direction here

My room is very small, only 4 x 3 meters, so I guess that needs to be taken into account. I mostly listen to metal, so I highly value transient response and non fatiguing mids / treble. Listening distance is about 8 feet. A pair of JBL 2226H stands for bass duty, so any peformance questions in the bass department can be neglected. I can equalize any frequenzy irregularities in the whole spectrum.

Design 1:



B&C 8PE21 in Azura 204

and

B&C DE10 in 18sound XT120

Simple passive 12 db/octave crossover, and cd horn compensation digitally in my source.

Design 2:



Same drivers as design 1, but with XT1086 instead of XT120 and in an open baffle, without the Azurahorn.

Design 3:



Decware DFR-8 in Azura 204.

Design 4:



Tang-Band 1772 in Azura 204.


So... What to go for?

[dantheman]

I vote for either "1" or "2" with "2" being the most easily implemented I think if you want a nice FR/polar plot. I love the idea of big front horns and all, but I haven't heard any that didn't have something that annoyed me after the initial "wow!" wore off. Of course I've never heard the BD horns, so they may be different. From what I've read, you can't just equalize out too many problems.

It will be interesting to see where this goes,

Dan

[CLS]

What a sight! A pair of Azura 204 in a room of 3 by 4 m !

8" pro mid in such front horn will give you a hard time of mid/high integration, especially in such short listening distance. 8PE21 is said to be good to 3kHz or so in front horn, but by the size of the horn, you'll get huge c-c distance between this and whatever tweeter you might use.

I've heard Lowther PM4 with Oris 150 which should be in the top quality league IMHO. So I'd guess you'll have better chance to start with a high efficiency fullranger with severe rising response. Such horn would load the driver under 2kHz and give about 6 or more dB rise in SPL, so those screamingly shouting ones when naked might be just right with the horn.

[stickinsect]

Recently bought some secondhand Oris 150 horns to play with to put a spare pair of Focal Audiom 7K2 into,bass to be handled with 15" Audioms in an Onken enclosure.Will be interesting to see what horn loading brings to the party, the other pair being in a 14 litre IB midrange enclosure.

[Defo]

One way I could avoid the big c-c distance in design 1, is to place the DE10 halfway inside the Azura with a smaller horn, OR preferably find a even smaller tweeter. Something like this, but with higher efficiency...

[picowallspeaker]

Ha ha ! Nice joke ! I thought you were going in the direction of building a Plasma Tweeter!
I vote #2 , though I would make it tri-dimensional , the top being the mouth of a folded horn -Yes , it collects dust!

[Fuling]

Good to see that I´m not the only weirdo stuffing a front loaded horn system into such a small room
My room (a garden shed actually) is 3,8x3,1m and I have two corner loaded, wall hangning 40Hz bass horns, two 1m deep midbass horns loaded with JBL2202H drivers and two 250Hz square Kugelwellen horns with BM-D PA750 2" drivers...
WAF is obviously of no concern here.

My system:
Things that go bump in the night...

[Defo]

Maybe this one? Small enough to be placed inside the horn, a bit below the 8PE21, and decent efficiency.

[CLS]

Forget about any dome tweeter, please. Won't work. Even with nominal sensitivity of 96db/w, it's still at least 10db shy of what the mid horn would bring you, which is probably 106dB/w ( 98db/w Lowther in Oris 150, published by BD Desing.). I'd guess you'll get similar figure or even more with 8PE21 in Asura 204.

I've been using 1" Eminence APT horn tweeter with nominal 105dB/w. The Oris 150 horn is loading an old Focal unit with nominal sensitivity of 98db/w (same as 8PE21 and Lowther PM4, well, sort of... ). In reality, the in room response is down-tilt with a trend of slightly muffled high frequency, by 2~4dB. The mid horn is THAT powerful.

Fortunately, I myself happen to prefer warm balance, so that doesn't bother me. But 10dB gap (or more) is way too large. You won't hear any treble with that combo.

[Defo]

Will the DE35 handle a 3,5 khz second order crossover in normal spl applications?