Horn project for someone feeling adventurous?

[Nikodemuzz]

Hello all!

I am toying with the idea of another speaker project. We are planning to possibly build a house in a few years, and the living room there could be spacious enough to accommodate speakers of more "unusual" footprints and dimensions. I dare not speak this aloud around here yet, but one might even be able to design the living space to work as a listening area specifically. Although I have been most pleased with the FHXL's I currently have, such an opportunity makes one think...

I am pretty adept at woodworking, and might be willing to attempt something a bit more laborious in that respect. To be honest, I'm sort of looking for something beautiful to make. Well, how about some speakers for a change!

So what kind of speakers, then? Good question, because I am approaching this from a completely "wrong" angle, as primarily a woodworking project. However, I don't want to spend all that time and effort to build something that looks good but dissappoints sonically. In terms of sound I love the sense of space the FHXL's create, and they do generate decent bass. I definitely don't want to take a step down from them. If I could build upon their strengths, that would be great. I would like to be able to drive them with a ~20W class A amp.

I started to go through the Full Range Gallery thread, and almost immediately found something very interesting: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/full-range-speaker-photo-gallery.65061/post-733344 Unfortunately that post was a long time ago and I didn't find much details of the said project. The drivers used there seem to be discontinued, though.

Now something like that would be a great project, assuming they sound good as well! I'm sure there are other designs in the similar category, I just don't really know how to search for them. Would you have any suggestions?

 

[waxx]

You could try to recreate the Nelson Pass Kleinhorn, altough it wil need a sub below 50Hz...

https://www.passdiy.com/pdf/KleinHorn.pdf

The driver is still made, it's the Lowther DX55, that is not cheap altough (arround 600€ down here per driver).

 

[pelanj]

Have a look here: https://sonido.hu/index2.php?lang=en - there are some more plans you can get if you write an email to them. I can recommend the Sonido speakers, I own two pairs and they are great. Not as sensitive as Lowthers, but more XMax and definitely more affordable. Their oval 6x9" is really interesting. They also have fieldcoil drivers (not on the pages, but send them an email if interested), I think up to 10" size. And there are some unorthodox designs here: http://www.hm-moreart.de/1.htm.

I have the Sonidos in visually ugly boxes, but I can also recommend a Hedlund Horn (I have a pair with Lowther DX2) - a very enjoyable speaker.

 

[Nikodemuzz]

You could try to recreate the Nelson Pass Kleinhorn, altough it wil need a sub below 50Hz...

https://www.passdiy.com/pdf/KleinHorn.pdf

The driver is still made, it's the Lowther DX55, that is not cheap altough (arround 600€ down here per driver).

Thanks for the suggestion and link! Interesting design, very cool that Mr. Pass has gotten around to something like this as well.

I had a suspicion that some pretty colossal stuff might emerge, formulating my original post the way I did. I thought, let's see what happens and we'll draw some kind of line if we get to it. It appears we found it already with the first reply. 😀 What I'm trying to say is that these are perhaps a smidge too large for us...

Supplementing the speakers with a subwoofer is not out of the question at all. Would be better if it wasn't necessary, but especially with these horns I suppose the reality is what it is.

 

[Nikodemuzz]

Have a look here: https://sonido.hu/index2.php?lang=en - there are some more plans you can get if you write an email to them. I can recommend the Sonido speakers, I own two pairs and they are great. Not as sensitive as Lowthers, but more XMax and definitely more affordable. Their oval 6x9" is really interesting. They also have fieldcoil drivers (not on the pages, but send them an email if interested), I think up to 10" size. And there are some unorthodox designs here: http://www.hm-moreart.de/1.htm.

I have the Sonidos in visually ugly boxes, but I can also recommend a Hedlund Horn (I have a pair with Lowther DX2) - a very enjoyable speaker.

Thank you, interesting site, the gallery contains a lot of fascinating stuff! Actually, the horns I linked in the first post are also there. I wonder if they would have any additional information about them, I'll ask. Their Aion design looks interesting as well, I'll have to research that a bit. Same goes for the Hedlund Horn, thanks for the suggestion!

 

[waxx]

Then maybe something from Scottmoose is more up your alley, he sells plans of big dual horn speakers on his site: https://www.wodendesign.com

There are also a lot of free plans on that, all well studied and based on math, not guesswork. You could build the voight pipe type of enclosure found there: http://wodendesign.com/downloads/TEotW-ML-V-P11.pdf

 

[Retsel]

You should also check out the speaker ideas of Joseph Crowe. I don't have any affiliation with him, other than following his Lowther front horn projects, since I have Lowthers. I noticed that he is building speakers with other drivers which look interesting.

Retsel

 

[Pano]

Years ago at LSAF I heard a set of field coil Lowthers in big horns. It was Dave Slagle's room. Wow they were good! I'd love to spend some time with those speakers.

 

[DrBoar]

There is a horn that uses two 8" Pro drivers and a horn with 1" driver above 2 kHz, way more sturdy than Lowthers!
http://www.hififorum.nu/forum/pop_printer_friendly.asp?TOPIC_ID=77206
There is som scrolling to do but there are dimentions of the boxes, suggested drivers, measurements and pictures of actual loudspeakers built. Google translate is your friend.
Fancy woodwork does not have to translate to better sound. Carefullly bent curves and corners may lead to more of unwanted midrange getting through the backloaded horn...

 

[hm]

check out the double horns KANGLING and the DH-SAT-XL

 

[GM]

http://wodendesign.com/downloads/TEotW-ML-V-P11.pdf

AVAST Antivirus says it's infected with URL: Blacklist and aborted the DL. Ditto the main site link. 🙁

 

[waxx]

Avast gives a lot of false positives i'm affraid. I tested it on a few computers now, and nor Panda nor Norton nor Checkpoint give any error...

 

[planet10]

Ran across this forgotten project in the Woden Library.

For something exotic but i am sure it could be adapted.

dave

 

[xrk971]

Large wall mount Cornu spiral horn? A 10in driver monster sized back loaded horn by Doctor Why.

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...u-spiral-horn-now-you-can.225622/post-5308063

200kg each!

I recall he said these will shake your house apart with only a few watts of power.

 

[Pano]

Ran across this forgotten project

That looks like fun! You'd want a big living room for those.

 

[Scottmoose]

You'd be surprised actually; they're not as big as you'd think.

 

[Scottmoose]

AVAST Antivirus says it's infected with URL: Blacklist and aborted the DL. Ditto the main site link. 🙁

That's annoying, wonder why it's doing that. I've checked everything as far as I can with Bitdefender & Malwarebytes & it's all fine. However, for completeness, clean pdf attached here. Nothing novel, but should work OK.

 

[Pano]

they're not as big as you'd think.

I was figuring on a 6.5" driver for scale. But if it's a 3" then that would make a difference. 🙂

 

[Scottmoose]

5in IIRC. 😉 So it's not small, but it's not vast either; we're definitely not talking Kleinhorn scale here. 😉 We never finished it though as the project fizzled out.

 

[woodo]

Ran across this forgotten project in the Woden Library.

For something exotic but i am sure it could be adapted.

dave

They would look look awesome in the listening room. Have any plans ever been drafted?