First time horn help.. small footprint

[Matt@Nearfield]

Everyone hi,

I have been reading this forum for a fair length of time, and a big thank you to everyone for the huge wealth of information everyone has taken the time to share.

I come from long car audio background, but with age comes the inability to contort myself into footwells and the cold and wet in the winter isn't as fun as it once was

My current car system (so you can get an idea of taste), is a Tranport - Apogee dac - DBX 260 eq/xover - 1x hybrid horn amp running a pair of custom high frequency horns (630hz up ) and a pair of bipolar amps driving custom SS Revelator midbass (60-550hz), and a pair of reasonably efficient subs running IB (50hz down).

So I have decided to venture into the world of home audio, and boy what a whole new ball game it is. No longer do I have to be so concerned with path length differences, near field reflections and horrible enclosure possibilities It is a little depressing to see that crossovers are still axiomatic though

Mrs Nearfield has given me the go ahead to build a pair of speakers for the house, but I have some restrictions.. namely, she has to like to look of them....Having trawled 1000 pics the Wilson Benesch Arcs are the fav floor standers, or I can go small conical horn. Now I can't afford to pay Arc money,nor doI feel that I need to, besides, custom is just much more satisfying.

I would also like to run down the horn route. I'm a sucker for the effortless sounding realism, dynamics etc.

So I am looking for a design with a small foot print, height is not an issue, I can do the carbon fibre curved back and add some baffle compensation for a more cosmetic front pannel no problems, but I really need floor space to be no more than around 6-8in wide, and 10-12in deep.

I would like nothing more than to have a small conical horn for the top end mounted on the top.

Can anyone point me in the right direction. The problem I am having is finding a midbass - midrange horn enclosure with a smaller high end horn to go on top.. any thoughts?

Budget - £1000

Kindest,

Matt

[AndrewT]

Hi,
the labhorn would make a nice small footprint bass unit to mount your mid horn on top of.
Floor plan size is only 21 by 48 but i'm told you need 3 of them on the floor up against the wall otherwise you need 6 in a stack.
BTW those sizes were in inches maybe just a bit over size.
But looked at another way they perform with 10 times less power than any vented or sealed bass unit.

[hunter audio]

Hi

You could form some ideas from JBL - CMCD Drive Units as a start up for the mid bass unit

Turbo Sound has a very good design too

For the Hi s you could use the EV DH 1 A with a matching small horn - as per asthetics

Though all these are pro - audio , the cross - over if tweaked and designed well will performs well in - doors too as I think you like to go loud distortion free over the entire band width

at home or outside

Suranjan Das Gupta