Building John's Paper Mache Horns

[xrk971]

Here's the on-axis response at approximately 2'-0" from the horn mouth. Its within 5 db from 300 Hz to 10 kHz. To me, that's awesome.

I only got to listen to it for a little while today. I sat the horn and the linkage on a chewed-out chair next to the OB. It is crossed to a Eminence Deltalite 2515II on an OB. Crude 24db BW crossover at 400 Hz. Even with the crude crossover and a thorough mismatch with the bass section, it sounded awesome. Horns have an effortless quality to them that makes them very easy to listen to. It fills the room with sound. Voices have this palpable, real quality which I really enjoy. Plus the paper, IMO, adds a very soft and natural flow to the sound. More listening impressions after the second horn is done.

The bass was obviously lagging behind by 15-20db in efficiency. The bass amp went into protection several times trying to supply enough power to keep up with the top horn.

The bass section really needs a horn for itself. I'm planning to build a reflex loaded front horn that can get me down to 40 Hz.

Awesome work ! Measurements look great, can you please show corresponding harmonic distortion data ? I have built tractrix horns with foam core and got substantial reduction in HD by adding heavy layer of caulking and second layer of foam core for CLD.

 

[ra7]

The harmonic distortion data is in the Beyond the Ariel thread. I'll go look for it and re-post it here. Basically, distortion is quite low, especially the higher orders. But what is special about them is the smoothness of the response (note that smoothness is different from flatness). If you read Toole's book and the research Olive did about what parameters contribute to good sound, smoothness is one of the highly weighted quantities. Because of the remarkably smooth response, it sounds really, really good.