Jordan JX53, Good for horn loading???

[Greggo]

I have read a lot of good things about the little Jordans on this forum and others, was wondering what you all thought about horn loading a single JX53 rather than putting four of them in an array? Any pros or cons I should consider?

I was thinking about building a conical horn designed to run from around 800Hz to 4,000Hz thinking that this would be a reasonable range for a single horn and that this range would not stress the driver or generate an excess amount of heat in the voice coil when driven fairly hard. I know the single Jordan does not take kindly to too much power, and I am just guessing lower frequency cone travel is a potential problem and higher frequencies would generate more heat than mid to mid-tweet range. Are my assumptions in the ballpark here or am I missing something?

I would think that a single JX53 horn loaded would produce around 90db at one watt/meter and 8ohms, and be a perfect match for a nice gain clone amp design....

Any comments or other ideas?

Thanks

Greg Jensen
Asheville, NC

[chris ma]

Just want to let you know that I do not like the sound of Jx53 when I band pass it or limit it in the range of 800hz to 6500hz or there about. It sound much better when feed from 800hz and up all the way. I found no problem with its power handling but then I only use a no more than 40W power amp with it. It is loud enough and if push hard I can feel pain in my ear drums as it beams piercing hard high frequency at high volume

[Greggo]

Hmmm, interesting thought, I guess I would not worry about just letting it run full up into the high frequencies as my primary thought was not expecting a horn to load the higher frequencies as effectively as it would for the first octave or two. I could run a JX53 from 800hz and up and then just roll in a super tweeter at the point where the horn stops providing much boost, assuming I could hear and/or figure out where that point is... Anyways, thank you for sharing your opinion, it is much appreciated.

[GM]

Greets!

FR drivers can't be compression loaded without seriously compromising their performance so work best in tractrix, conical, and parabolic designs, ergo the horn is only for BSC purposes regardless of whether it's front or rear loaded. Since it's very inefficient, 90dB sens. from this single driver is a 'pipe dream' unless you use two and your amp can comfortably drive a nominal 3 ohm load.

Acoustic pressure increases at 3dB/octave with decreasing frequency, so on average, so does excursion/VC heating (raising Qts)/power required. Music's highest peaks ('fastest' transients) occur in the 250-500Hz BW though, so it's this BW that requires the most peak power if no system clipping is a performance goal. Since recorded music can have up to at least +30dB peak-to-average transients, the vast majority of systems clip in this BW whether it's obvious to the listener or not because this isn't a consideration in most folk's system selection criteria.

Anyway, you can make an MTM and mildly horn load it, though it will be quite large relatively speaking due to starting with a large throat if you don't use a Unity concept layout.

GM