I don't know if there is such a thing — may I just invented it, but feel free to claim it and build it.
The way I mis/understand horns is that
1) the speaker cone pushes a column of air. Ordinarily, in "free space" a compression wave expands outwards from the speaker in all directions.
2) A so-called horn (usually shaped like a funnel) attempts to confine the air near the cone into a longitudinal column so that the total energy transferred to the air is maximised.
3) At the same time, a cylindrical 'pipe' would be highly resonant like a musical instrument, whereas what we usually want for a speaker is a smooth spectrum. So we end up with some kind of horn shape that is equally efficient across a range of frequencies.
4) A side-effect of all this is that these speakers usually become very directional, which is not always desirable.
What if we could produce a "column" of air that is evenly dispersed across a range of angles, but has similar compression to an exponential horn? For instance, a collection of stretched 'ovoid' shapes are pressed together, resembling a hedgehog (with a barely visible speaker buried inside) from the point of hearing of the listener. The gaps between the solids control the expansion rate of the horn. I've seen this in 2-D, where a horn with narrow vertical dispersion has a series of fins controlling the horizontal dispersion (e.g.: Visaton M 300). But with 3-D printing, or even wood-turning and a lot of patience, these ovoids could be aligned to fill a hemisphere.
Thoughts?
The way I mis/understand horns is that
1) the speaker cone pushes a column of air. Ordinarily, in "free space" a compression wave expands outwards from the speaker in all directions.
2) A so-called horn (usually shaped like a funnel) attempts to confine the air near the cone into a longitudinal column so that the total energy transferred to the air is maximised.
3) At the same time, a cylindrical 'pipe' would be highly resonant like a musical instrument, whereas what we usually want for a speaker is a smooth spectrum. So we end up with some kind of horn shape that is equally efficient across a range of frequencies.
4) A side-effect of all this is that these speakers usually become very directional, which is not always desirable.
What if we could produce a "column" of air that is evenly dispersed across a range of angles, but has similar compression to an exponential horn? For instance, a collection of stretched 'ovoid' shapes are pressed together, resembling a hedgehog (with a barely visible speaker buried inside) from the point of hearing of the listener. The gaps between the solids control the expansion rate of the horn. I've seen this in 2-D, where a horn with narrow vertical dispersion has a series of fins controlling the horizontal dispersion (e.g.: Visaton M 300). But with 3-D printing, or even wood-turning and a lot of patience, these ovoids could be aligned to fill a hemisphere.
Thoughts?
2-ways but an omni horn driven by a compression driver (all but the 2 smallest): https://www.duevel.com/en-gb/
dave
dave