It is all about acoustic matching the driver to the room. It is a form of mechanical impedance matching to the room. The impedance of air increasingly becomes mismatched as speaker cone area decreases, but can be brought to balance by the artifice of a properly designed horn.
@@JEG6919 My dad had a pair of Klipsch Klipschorn speakers in our living room when I was a kid. A kid my age in my neighborhood had a Paragon speaker in their music room. My first PA speakers were a pair of Peavey Model 1 speakers.
I just did an image search and apparently, those Peavey speakers were called "SP1". For some reason, I seem to recall the back of them saying Model 1 instead of SP1.
Larry Niles are you blind lad? I have linked in the comments section a recent interview positive feedback had with Greg Timbers of JBL fame. Paul is an affable guy, no speaker guru by any stretch.
Paul, it might have been good to mention the Iron Law of speaker design. As I'm sure you know, it goes like this: 3 of the primary goals of speaker design are high sensitivity, deep bass, and small cabinet size. However, because of the physics of the world we live in, you can achieve only 2 of those goals, never all 3. You can choose the 2 that you or your customers value most highly, and compromise on the third, or try to even things up by compromising on the strong 2. That's where the tough decisions come in.
I would assume that with for example a klipsch bookshelf speaker that the tweeter plays louder than the woofer and the resulting sound is bright and detailed in the top end, but if held back on an EQ, it is less likely to sound fuzzy at high volume levels.
Nice lecture! I like how you would lower the woofer output in it's normal range to meet it's -4db point vs raising the 40Hz output to push it up to meet the flat area of the response curve. A lot of car amps have bass boost controls to force up the low end which is not really the best thing IMO. Yes, you could have a woofer that can be 100db+ of sensitivity @ 30Hz, but it'd be ultra HUGE! LOL.
The amplification of horns allows the diaphragm to create the necessary sound pressure levels with very little movement. Horns typically have 1/10th to 1/25th the harmonic distortion of the less-efficient direct drivers and also put less strain on the electronics, whose distortion increases proportionately with work load. Horns with wave guides or compound curvature of their throats distribute wave fronts to fit a rectangular listening space, usually with a larger horizontal dimension. Circular horns of the old-fashioned kind sprayed a round wave front and wasted a lot of energy on ceilings and floors. The most accurate transducers use compression drivers for both high-frequencies and mid-range band width. Bass notes are omni-directional and can be handled by a cone speaker. Today, the most elaborate and costly sound systems utilize compression horns for most of their transducer designs and reduce all known sources of distortion to the inaudible level. That, and realistic dynamic levels comparable to live performances, is what audiophiles pay the big bucks to achieve. The laws of physics were discovered long ago and the pioneers - Bell Labs, Western Electric, Lansing, et al had applied these principles to acoustic reproduction equipment in the last century. Most of today's speaker designs are not really new but variations and subtle refinements of existing art. If you see a patent number on a product, chances are it is a design patent (for the aesthetics), not an indicator of unique mechanics or circuitry. Audio devices are smaller than ever before, but sound wave dimensions remain unaltered, as is the human ear's range. The ear is an electro-mechanical device, with a combination of a diaphragm connected to bones, connected to nerve endings, It is analog in nature and a stepless energy transfer mechanism. Digital is minutely intemittent. Perhaps that is why people feel LP records sound more natural and "warmer." Cupping your hands to alter your voice is not analogous to the well-designed exponential horn. With hands, you have the barrel effect of echos which distort the timbre of the sound. Computer-aided designs remove this characteristic. Recorded sounds at close proximity to horn speakers distorts in a similar manner. The speaker is designed to sound optimal beyond a certain distance, where the wave fronts from the separate speakers blend. Your don't listen to a jazz ensemble sitting next to one instrument. Neither should you mike practically inside the mouth of a horn speaker, unless you're trying to demonstrate the 'superiority' of a direct radiator system.
That might be fun but I would be terrible at a debate. I don't do well in those kinds of environments. Not quick enough on my feet and don't treat confrontation in a good way. My defenses quickly get involved and then I spend more time defending a position rather than offering whatever genuine insight I might have to share.
CORRECTION, horns are acoustic TRANSFORMERS not amplifiers, tiny movement of diaphragm on horn, means LOW non-linear distortion vs regular speaker. (But correctable linear distortion might be natively higher e.g. non flat, correct with DSP or passive crossover).
I have a slightly diff question: for purposes of community announcements, is a horn better than a DJ speaker in terms of loudness of voice and throwing further in the community?
Horns are typically more directional and so as long as you're alright with "aiming" the speakers at your audience then yes, horns would likely throw the sound a bit further.
Horn loaded woofers are rare merely because they need to be big. The cut-off frequency is determined by the size of the horn's mouth. J Dinsdale published a fully horn-loaded speaker design in Wireless World back in 1974: diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Papers/Horn-Loudspeaker-Design-Part-3.pdf It's 66 x 49 x 39 inches. Despite its size, this design rolls off below 40 Hz. If you look at the paper you will also see it's quite a complex build. One aspect of this speaker that had me fascinated when I heard one back in the dim and distant past: surface clicks and pops on records seemed much attenuated. They also sounded excellent. The bass response of Bailey's transmission line (Wireless World in 1972) was noticeably better. The Bailey speakers also needed a more powerful amplifier, an important consideration when amps were typically 10 to 25 Watts per channel.
Horn speakers aren't for everyone,,You can tell he was asking about Klipsch..I have a pair of the RP-600m bookshelf speakers paired with 2 - BIC PL 200 II subs and i'm loving them,,It all depends on what music you're into..For myself it's all about the live webcast concerts and replicating the live concert sound in my house ... www.nugs.net is where you can get live concerts as they happen
@@poserwanabeHe's clueless ..Why make a comment that is so untrue ..Go on Tidal and search for Dead and Company and listen to TD Garden 11/17/17 and tell me that sounds like shit lol
efficiency or sensitivity dont matter much to me, its just a volume thing, i can just turn up the volume.... high sensitivity speakers has some drawbacks, they often use bassreflex or horn, large drivers that does midrange, they also exaggerate the noise floor of amps so you might get hiss noise. the benefits are less complex crossover that might get you better sound.
The thing about sensitive speakers is that they typically do dynamics better than speakers that aren't as sensitive. You would think that you could compensate by bigger amplifiers, and that holds true for achieving the same volume level, but the attack of the notes often sound muted or compressed by less sensitive speakers. If you listen to speakers that are 100dB and compare them to ones that are 85dB, the 100dB sound more "live". Also, you have a greater variety of amps you can use with highly sensitive speakers. With low sensitivity speakers, I've found that you almost always want a very powerful solid-state amp.
You can't just turn up the volume.... what if you want to produce 130db like in the cinema ? I wanna build a home cinema and i want to reach reference levels that is 105db highs and 115db bass. To each 105db at the listening position which will be around 4meters away, each speaker needs to produce 117db/1m. I can't turn up the volume on my Dali Zersor 5 to reach those level. There aren't high end speakers (even the 100 000$ ones) that can reach those levels. What if i sit 5 meters away ? That's why horns and paper cone drivers exists. When turning up the volume doesn't work.
Greg Timber 2017 interview not telling me new things, my point stand uncontested. sensitivity dont matter as you think it does, you can make the same speaker with big drivers and horns in big boxes and make it less efficient with a crossover, should sound pretty much the same. and if it does sound worse then its all in the crossover as i said.
According to the video "World's Second Best Speakers" ua-cam.com/video/EEh01PX-q9I/v-deo.html, the reason that horns are more efficient is that they allow the driver behind them to match the physical impedance of the air around them better. (I'm winging this so my terminology may be slightly off.) In other words, the horn allows a driver to push a small amount of air that is then able to push more and more air as the tube flares out, meeting the open air with a pressure wave that is as large as the opening of the horn. It's not so much an amplifier as it is an "efficiencyfier." There is no more energy coming from the driver. It's just not being lost by allowing air to "get out of the way" until a much larger volume of it is forced to move with the driver. Like pushing a ball with a stick, in an open space a ball will move out of the way, but in a narrow channel a stick can push a ball very efficiently. Air in a horn is like balls in a channel than cannot get out of the way and therefore must move in step with the driver. At the opening of the horn that larger surface wave is then able to affect more of the air in the room. A horn in front of a driver doesn't direct the sound or focus it. It just makes more of the air in front of it move by stepping down a very high impedance at the narrow end of the horn, to a much lower impedance at the opening (bell) where it meets with open air. A driver pushes on a small amount of air which pushes on a slightly larger amount, increasing as the horn get wider, eventually pushing a wave that is as wide as the opening. The flare of most modern horns is an exponential curve because that is what moves the most air, making the horn as efficient as possible.
Old Klipsch specs were pretty good, but I find the sensitivity figures for their Reference line suspect. Several tests I have seen seem to confirm this. 1 reasons I suspect is they rate their speakers at 8 ohms whereas the woofer region measures 4 ohms. There are others but I don't have any proof.
@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt It seems unnecessary for Klipsch to exaggerate their speakers' sensitivity numbers. Why claim some dubious number, like they are 10 times more sensitive than other speakers, and lose credibility, when most of their speakers are in fact 5 times more sensitive than their competition? Those numbers are just generalizations across the Klipsch product lines, but you get the idea. The truth is impressive enough.
@@nomorokay2 Listen they have been tested and the RP 600m was tested at 89db instead of the spec'd 96db. You can't have a highly sensitive tweeter with a much lower sensitive woofer and maintain the balance. The tweeter has to be padded down and the woofer in a small box will not get deep bass so usually they are flattened. In a large box you can get away with a little flattening. Why do you think there are no Klipsch speakers with a 20Hz response? The video even explains this quite clearly. Do you not understand how physics works? Even in large horn loaded PA speakers you will rarely find 20Hz response. They can't do it while maintaining the high efficiency, which is what you need in a PA system. Klipsch lies in their small speakers because their name is synonymous with efficiency. Unlike their larger speakers, Klipsch cannot get 40Hz and 96db sensitivity together. This is just not new with the RP series but the previous RB series as well. You can have only two of the three following things at any one time. High efficiency, deep bass and a reasonable sized cabinet. What reason do they have to lie? If you have to ask this question, you must really naive or young? Bottom line if you want reasonably deep bass with reasonably high sensitivity, you are going to have to look at a large horn speaker. That means one with a horn loaded woofer as well. Hell the Klipschorn only went down to around 35Hz and it was corner loaded. This was a must in order to maintain the claimed 104db spec. I say claimed because I have never measured one nor have I read a published test of one. In 2004 Stereophile wanted to do a review on a Klipschorn but Klipsch refused to supply one. Gee, I wonder why that would be?
@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt As it happens, I have 5 fully horn-loaded Klipsch speakers in my system: 2 La Scala IIs, modified with large Jubilee tweeters, 2 first-generation La Scalas for surround, and a Belle Klipsch for the centre. As you might guess, I'm not young, and I don't think I'm naive. Some differences between the claimed numbers and the numbers published by magazine testers may have to do with the testing methods. The most accurate and repeatable setup is to have the speaker in free space, that is, mounted on a pole, a fair distance from the ground. This ensures that there's no room gain, or it can be called boundary reinforcement. This test method is a challenge when working with 175-pound speakers, and it produces numbers that have no relevance to a home listening situation. If the speaker is placed on the ground, in a wide-open area, this is described as half-space, since it's radiating sound in just the top half of a sphere. Easier to do, but less accurate. When the speaker is in a room, its bass response in particular is improved. To get the most realistic response, that represents a home listening situation, the speaker should be placed in a corner, and most Klipsch speakers are designed to be placed in corners. That's considered to be 1/8 space. It's easily repeatable, but some testers feel that testing with that placement is cheating, or gives Klipsch speakers an unfair advantage, since many other speaker manufacturers recommend that their speakers be placed out in the room. Testing Klipsch speakers while they're out from the walls gives lower numbers than the numbers that Klipsch publishes. Klipsch tests their speakers as they would normally be used, while magazine testers position those speakers as they would position many other speakers. This is in an effort to standardize their testing methods, but it doesn't reflect real-world listening conditions. So are the testers poorly informed? Is Klipsch "cheating"? No, and No. If another "different" speaker, like an omnidirectional model, is tested while placed tight in a corner, it will sound overly bass-heavy, which is unfair and unrealistic. The solution is for speakers to be tested while they're placed where the manufacturer recommends, and for the prospective buyers to be educated as to the differences between various speaker types, and the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Nobody's lying, some are just speaking different dialects of the same audio language.
There's NOTHING that can match a well designed horn speaker! You may think a 1200W amp and many woofers in a box make the best sound. Wrong. Give me a ~10W amp on a well designed horn system any day. If realism is what you are after, and isn't it what we are all after? Then horns are the way to go. Paul, you really must hear a proper horn system!
I don't know where you read that. Any horn woofer I have dealt with is no less than 5% up to 20% and midranges run 20% or more. Here is a link to a JBL spec sheet. www.jblpro.com/pages/pub/components/2490.pdf
Somehow you seriously against horns but you keep telling a woofer can have a sensitivity around 95dB. A design of woofer always about compromises because low frequencies cannot be made by a very thin membrane so coils has to move back and forth a heavier than a tweeter does. However, horns amplifies efficient drivers as well as a less efficient one so a horn speaker always more efficient.
@@soring5880 Klipsch RP6000F (1" Titanium Horn Tweeter, 2x 6.5" Cerametallic Woofers): 34 - 25kHz +/- 3dB 97dB @ 2.83V / 1m 125W/500W 8 Ohms Focal Aria 926 (1" Al/Mg TNF inverted dome tweeter, 2x 6.5" Flax bass woofers, 1x 6.5" Flax midrange woofer): 45Hz - 28kHz +/- 3dB 91.5dB @ 2.83V / 1m 40W - 250W 2.9 - 8 Ohms Focal Chorus 716 (1" Al/Mg TNF inverted dome tweeter, 1x 6.5" Polyglass bass woofer, 1x 6.5" Polyglass midrange woofer): 50Hz - 28kHz +/- 3dB 91.5dB @ 2.83V / 1m 40W - 200W 4.3 - 8 Ohms I compared the Chorus because of the price and woofer size, the Aria because I wanted to give Focal a second chance regarding frequency response, even though the price is not comparable. The Chorus lack a lot of bass compared to the RP6000F, the Aria sound better, but there still is a significant amount of bass not being reproduced.
@M Pi Are you implying they have deep bass and are efficient? Don't make me piss my pants. Klipsch lies with their bookshelf speakers all the time. In fact their recent RP 600m speakers were tested at about 89db instead of their claimed 96db. You're a fanboy without facts. If I misinterpreted your statement, I apologize and I have to go change my pants.
JBL's most expensive speakers, the Synergy Series of Everest Models use compression horns for the transducer responsible for 85% of the audible bandwidth. Top Klipsch always has.
IF the good people that designed and built the Infinity IRS5 speakers thought horns were a great benefit, they would be incorporated in them. They ARE NOT of ANY benefit, so they weren't
It is all about acoustic matching the driver to the room. It is a form of mechanical impedance matching to the room.
The impedance of air increasingly becomes mismatched as speaker cone area decreases, but can be brought to balance by the artifice of a properly designed horn.
Indeed, the horn is purely an impedance adapter to transmission medium aka air. But who cares about physics.
"I carried that in my damn luggage all the way from India" A TRUE audiophile!!
Every since I heard a JBL D44000 Paragon in the 1960s when I was a child. I have always liked the sound of horn loaded speakers.
Ronald Grew up with a paragon. Paul is the wrong guy to be responding to this question as well.
@@JEG6919 My dad had a pair of Klipsch Klipschorn speakers in our living room when I was a kid. A kid my age in my neighborhood had a Paragon speaker in their music room. My first PA speakers were a pair of Peavey Model 1 speakers.
I just did an image search and apparently, those Peavey speakers were called "SP1". For some reason, I seem to recall the back of them saying Model 1 instead of SP1.
@Larry Niles Agreed. I often disagree with Paul's opinion, but he certainly has cred.
Larry Niles are you blind lad? I have linked in the comments section a recent interview positive feedback had with Greg Timbers of JBL fame. Paul is an affable guy, no speaker guru by any stretch.
Paul, it might have been good to mention the Iron Law of speaker design. As I'm sure you know, it goes like this: 3 of the primary goals of speaker design are high sensitivity, deep bass, and small cabinet size. However, because of the physics of the world we live in, you can achieve only 2 of those goals, never all 3.
You can choose the 2 that you or your customers value most highly, and compromise on the third, or try to even things up by compromising on the strong 2. That's where the tough decisions come in.
I would assume that with for example a klipsch bookshelf speaker that the tweeter plays louder than the woofer and the resulting sound is bright and detailed in the top end, but if held back on an EQ, it is less likely to sound fuzzy at high volume levels.
Nice lecture! I like how you would lower the woofer output in it's normal range to meet it's -4db point vs raising the 40Hz output to push it up to meet the flat area of the response curve. A lot of car amps have bass boost controls to force up the low end which is not really the best thing IMO. Yes, you could have a woofer that can be 100db+ of sensitivity @ 30Hz, but it'd be ultra HUGE! LOL.
The amplification of horns allows the diaphragm to create the necessary sound pressure levels with very little movement. Horns typically have 1/10th to 1/25th the harmonic distortion of the less-efficient direct drivers and also put less strain on the electronics, whose distortion increases proportionately with work load. Horns with wave guides or compound curvature of their throats distribute wave fronts to fit a rectangular listening space, usually with a larger horizontal dimension. Circular horns of the old-fashioned kind sprayed a round wave front and wasted a lot of energy on ceilings and floors. The most accurate transducers use compression drivers for both high-frequencies and mid-range band width. Bass notes are omni-directional and can be handled by a cone speaker.
Today, the most elaborate and costly sound systems utilize compression horns for most of their transducer designs and reduce all known sources of distortion to the inaudible level. That, and realistic dynamic levels comparable to live performances, is what audiophiles pay the big bucks to achieve. The laws of physics were discovered long ago and the pioneers - Bell Labs, Western Electric, Lansing, et al had applied these principles to acoustic reproduction equipment in the last century. Most of today's speaker designs are not really new but variations and subtle refinements of existing art. If you see a patent number on a product, chances are it is a design patent (for the aesthetics), not an indicator of unique mechanics or circuitry. Audio devices are smaller than ever before, but sound wave dimensions remain unaltered, as is the human ear's range. The ear is an electro-mechanical device, with a combination of a diaphragm connected to bones, connected to nerve endings, It is analog in nature and a stepless energy transfer mechanism. Digital is minutely intemittent. Perhaps that is why people feel LP records sound more natural and "warmer." Cupping your hands to alter your voice is not analogous to the well-designed exponential horn. With hands, you have the barrel effect of echos which distort the timbre of the sound. Computer-aided designs
remove this characteristic. Recorded sounds at close proximity to horn speakers distorts in a similar manner. The speaker is designed to sound optimal beyond a certain distance, where the wave fronts from the separate speakers blend. Your don't listen to a jazz ensemble sitting next to one instrument. Neither should you mike practically inside the mouth of a horn speaker, unless you're trying to demonstrate the 'superiority' of a direct radiator system.
Damn I was literally researching horns and you released this video 🙈
Finally, I get the answer! Great video.
Paul, your most brilliant vid...educational and informative......any chance you could debate the horn speaker with a guest say Rob Delgado ?
That might be fun but I would be terrible at a debate. I don't do well in those kinds of environments. Not quick enough on my feet and don't treat confrontation in a good way. My defenses quickly get involved and then I spend more time defending a position rather than offering whatever genuine insight I might have to share.
You mess with the bull you'll get the horn.
?
It’s an old saying, guys 😉
Surprised you’ve never heard that one.... My grandfather used to say it LOL!
@@davidecorazza7856 Ofcource we've heard it.
The downsides of a horn is the coloration induced by the horn and the size.
Easily solved by modern design and DSP, Klipschorn being made for 70 years, must be very correct.
CORRECTION, horns are acoustic TRANSFORMERS
not amplifiers,
tiny movement of diaphragm on horn, means LOW non-linear distortion vs regular speaker.
(But correctable linear distortion might be natively higher e.g. non flat, correct with DSP or passive crossover).
Sounds like the guy is talking about the latest Klipsch RP 600m. Lol
How much enhancement we can get from adding ditter on DAC?
Cheers from Indonesia
I have a slightly diff question: for purposes of community announcements, is a horn better than a DJ speaker in terms of loudness of voice and throwing further in the community?
Horns are typically more directional and so as long as you're alright with "aiming" the speakers at your audience then yes, horns would likely throw the sound a bit further.
YES.
Horn loaded woofers are rare merely because they need to be big. The cut-off frequency is determined by the size of the horn's mouth. J Dinsdale published a fully horn-loaded speaker design in Wireless World back in 1974:
diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Papers/Horn-Loudspeaker-Design-Part-3.pdf
It's 66 x 49 x 39 inches. Despite its size, this design rolls off below 40 Hz. If you look at the paper you will also see it's quite a complex build.
One aspect of this speaker that had me fascinated when I heard one back in the dim and distant past: surface clicks and pops on records seemed much attenuated. They also sounded excellent. The bass response of Bailey's transmission line (Wireless World in 1972) was noticeably better. The Bailey speakers also needed a more powerful amplifier, an important consideration when amps were typically 10 to 25 Watts per channel.
Paul, I hope you do a video demonstration of that phonograph. I was wondering if you have a cylinder player?
Horn speakers aren't for everyone,,You can tell he was asking about Klipsch..I have a pair of the RP-600m bookshelf speakers paired with 2 - BIC PL 200 II subs and i'm loving them,,It all depends on what music you're into..For myself it's all about the live webcast concerts and replicating the live concert sound in my house ... www.nugs.net is where you can get live concerts as they happen
Loving my 600ms too
Getting mine soon, yay
@True WingChun you're a fucking weirdo dude,,
@True WingChun
You've obviously never heard a great live sound engineer with great system, sorry bout dat...
@@poserwanabeHe's clueless ..Why make a comment that is so untrue ..Go on Tidal and search for Dead and Company and listen to TD Garden 11/17/17 and tell me that sounds like shit lol
efficiency or sensitivity dont matter much to me, its just a volume thing, i can just turn up the volume....
high sensitivity speakers has some drawbacks, they often use bassreflex or horn, large drivers that does midrange, they also exaggerate the noise floor of amps so you might get hiss noise.
the benefits are less complex crossover that might get you better sound.
The thing about sensitive speakers is that they typically do dynamics better than speakers that aren't as sensitive. You would think that you could compensate by bigger amplifiers, and that holds true for achieving the same volume level, but the attack of the notes often sound muted or compressed by less sensitive speakers. If you listen to speakers that are 100dB and compare them to ones that are 85dB, the 100dB sound more "live". Also, you have a greater variety of amps you can use with highly sensitive speakers. With low sensitivity speakers, I've found that you almost always want a very powerful solid-state amp.
sudd Hello? Positive feedback online. Search Greg Timber. 2017 interview with real world answers...
You can't just turn up the volume....
what if you want to produce 130db like in the cinema ?
I wanna build a home cinema and i want to reach reference levels that is 105db highs and 115db bass. To each 105db at the listening position which will be around 4meters away, each speaker needs to produce 117db/1m.
I can't turn up the volume on my Dali Zersor 5 to reach those level. There aren't high end speakers (even the 100 000$ ones) that can reach those levels. What if i sit 5 meters away ?
That's why horns and paper cone drivers exists. When turning up the volume doesn't work.
you are talking about bigger speakers and drivers, low sensitivity speakers can also be big. then you get same benefit.
Greg Timber 2017 interview not telling me new things, my point stand uncontested.
sensitivity dont matter as you think it does, you can make the same speaker with big drivers and horns in big boxes and make it less efficient with a crossover, should sound pretty much the same. and if it does sound worse then its all in the crossover as i said.
Yes they are better
And system that is horn loaded, is the one to go with
According to the video "World's Second Best Speakers" ua-cam.com/video/EEh01PX-q9I/v-deo.html, the reason that horns are more efficient is that they allow the driver behind them to match the physical impedance of the air around them better. (I'm winging this so my terminology may be slightly off.) In other words, the horn allows a driver to push a small amount of air that is then able to push more and more air as the tube flares out, meeting the open air with a pressure wave that is as large as the opening of the horn. It's not so much an amplifier as it is an "efficiencyfier." There is no more energy coming from the driver. It's just not being lost by allowing air to "get out of the way" until a much larger volume of it is forced to move with the driver.
Like pushing a ball with a stick, in an open space a ball will move out of the way, but in a narrow channel a stick can push a ball very efficiently. Air in a horn is like balls in a channel than cannot get out of the way and therefore must move in step with the driver. At the opening of the horn that larger surface wave is then able to affect more of the air in the room. A horn in front of a driver doesn't direct the sound or focus it. It just makes more of the air in front of it move by stepping down a very high impedance at the narrow end of the horn, to a much lower impedance at the opening (bell) where it meets with open air. A driver pushes on a small amount of air which pushes on a slightly larger amount, increasing as the horn get wider, eventually pushing a wave that is as wide as the opening. The flare of most modern horns is an exponential curve because that is what moves the most air, making the horn as efficient as possible.
How does klipsch work ? or they just lie about the sensitivity,
I can't find a single test on the internet if their spec are correct.
Old Klipsch specs were pretty good, but I find the sensitivity figures for their Reference line suspect. Several tests I have seen seem to confirm this. 1 reasons I suspect is they rate their speakers at 8 ohms whereas the woofer region measures 4 ohms. There are others but I don't have any proof.
Look at the stereophile review of the Klipsch RP 600m. Yes they lie.
@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt It seems unnecessary for Klipsch to exaggerate their speakers' sensitivity numbers. Why claim some dubious number, like they are 10 times more sensitive than other speakers, and lose credibility, when most of their speakers are in fact 5 times more sensitive than their competition? Those numbers are just generalizations across the Klipsch product lines, but you get the idea.
The truth is impressive enough.
@@nomorokay2 Listen they have been tested and the RP 600m was tested at 89db instead of the spec'd 96db. You can't have a highly sensitive tweeter with a much lower sensitive woofer and maintain the balance. The tweeter has to be padded down and the woofer in a small box will not get deep bass so usually they are flattened. In a large box you can get away with a little flattening. Why do you think there are no Klipsch speakers with a 20Hz response? The video even explains this quite clearly. Do you not understand how physics works? Even in large horn loaded PA speakers you will rarely find 20Hz response. They can't do it while maintaining the high efficiency, which is what you need in a PA system. Klipsch lies in their small speakers because their name is synonymous with efficiency. Unlike their larger speakers, Klipsch cannot get 40Hz and 96db sensitivity together. This is just not new with the RP series but the previous RB series as well.
You can have only two of the three following things at any one time. High efficiency, deep bass and a reasonable sized cabinet. What reason do they have to lie? If you have to ask this question, you must really naive or young?
Bottom line if you want reasonably deep bass with reasonably high sensitivity, you are going to have to look at a large horn speaker. That means one with a horn loaded woofer as well. Hell the Klipschorn only went down to around 35Hz and it was corner loaded. This was a must in order to maintain the claimed 104db spec. I say claimed because I have never measured one nor have I read a published test of one. In 2004 Stereophile wanted to do a review on a Klipschorn but Klipsch refused to supply one. Gee, I wonder why that would be?
@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt As it happens, I have 5 fully horn-loaded Klipsch speakers in my system: 2 La Scala IIs, modified with large Jubilee tweeters, 2 first-generation La Scalas for surround, and a Belle Klipsch for the centre.
As you might guess, I'm not young, and I don't think I'm naive. Some differences between the claimed numbers and the numbers published by magazine testers may have to do with the testing methods. The most accurate and repeatable setup is to have the speaker in free space, that is, mounted on a pole, a fair distance from the ground. This ensures that there's no room gain, or it can be called boundary reinforcement. This test method is a challenge when working with 175-pound speakers, and it produces numbers that have no relevance to a home listening situation.
If the speaker is placed on the ground, in a wide-open area, this is described as half-space, since it's radiating sound in just the top half of a sphere. Easier to do, but less accurate.
When the speaker is in a room, its bass response in particular is improved. To get the most realistic response, that represents a home listening situation, the speaker should be placed in a corner, and most Klipsch speakers are designed to be placed in corners. That's considered to be 1/8 space. It's easily repeatable, but some testers feel that testing with that placement is cheating, or gives Klipsch speakers an unfair advantage, since many other speaker manufacturers recommend that their speakers be placed out in the room.
Testing Klipsch speakers while they're out from the walls gives lower numbers than the numbers that Klipsch publishes.
Klipsch tests their speakers as they would normally be used, while magazine testers position those speakers as they would position many other speakers. This is in an effort to standardize their testing methods, but it doesn't reflect real-world listening conditions.
So are the testers poorly informed? Is Klipsch "cheating"? No, and No. If another "different" speaker, like an omnidirectional model, is tested while placed tight in a corner, it will sound overly bass-heavy, which is unfair and unrealistic.
The solution is for speakers to be tested while they're placed where the manufacturer recommends, and for the prospective buyers to be educated as to the differences between various speaker types, and the advantages and disadvantages of each type.
Nobody's lying, some are just speaking different dialects of the same audio language.
Horns amplify sound
There's NOTHING that can match a well designed horn speaker! You may think a 1200W amp and many woofers in a box make the best sound. Wrong.
Give me a ~10W amp on a well designed horn system any day. If realism is what you are after, and isn't it what we are all after? Then horns are the way to go. Paul, you really must hear a proper horn system!
Can we use horn speaker in movie theater .
That's originally what it was designed for and dominates today, 100 years later.
I can never understand those who down-vote stuff here. Why don't they just unsubscribe and get it over with ?
Because sometimes we agree with Paul and sometimes we don't, but it always makes for interesting reading.
@Matt H so you're downvoting a good discussion .. Now it all makes sense ..
I read that horns are only about 2% efficient (domes 1%) How about plasma & folded ribbons?
I don't know where you read that. Any horn woofer I have dealt with is no less than 5% up to 20% and midranges run 20% or more. Here is a link to a JBL spec sheet. www.jblpro.com/pages/pub/components/2490.pdf
Horns are probably more like 5 or 6 percent.
Somehow you seriously against horns but you keep telling a woofer can have a sensitivity around 95dB. A design of woofer always about compromises because low frequencies cannot be made by a very thin membrane so coils has to move back and forth a heavier than a tweeter does. However, horns amplifies efficient drivers as well as a less efficient one so a horn speaker always more efficient.
So the short answer is yes, high efficiency speakers generally have less bass.
M Pi which exact klipsch model has better / lower bass than another speaker with same size cabinet / woofer that is less efficient?
@@soring5880
Klipsch RP6000F (1" Titanium Horn Tweeter, 2x 6.5" Cerametallic Woofers):
34 - 25kHz +/- 3dB
97dB @ 2.83V / 1m
125W/500W
8 Ohms
Focal Aria 926 (1" Al/Mg TNF inverted dome tweeter, 2x 6.5" Flax bass woofers, 1x 6.5" Flax midrange woofer):
45Hz - 28kHz +/- 3dB
91.5dB @ 2.83V / 1m
40W - 250W
2.9 - 8 Ohms
Focal Chorus 716 (1" Al/Mg TNF inverted dome tweeter, 1x 6.5" Polyglass bass woofer, 1x 6.5" Polyglass midrange woofer):
50Hz - 28kHz +/- 3dB
91.5dB @ 2.83V / 1m
40W - 200W
4.3 - 8 Ohms
I compared the Chorus because of the price and woofer size, the Aria because I wanted to give Focal a second chance regarding frequency response, even though the price is not comparable. The Chorus lack a lot of bass compared to the RP6000F, the Aria sound better, but there still is a significant amount of bass not being reproduced.
@@deni196496 good answer. But I did mention "generally" not "always"😉
And they sometimes lie.
@M Pi Are you implying they have deep bass and are efficient? Don't make me piss my pants. Klipsch lies with their bookshelf speakers all the time. In fact their recent RP 600m speakers were tested at about 89db instead of their claimed 96db. You're a fanboy without facts. If I misinterpreted your statement, I apologize and I have to go change my pants.
I’m at 0 views and 0 likes (well one from me)
Here you go, buddy, here's 1 for ya!
I'm going to give you an original track to use. I think you need something better.
I love my JBL Studio 590's!! Better than Klipsch in my opinion....
JBL's most expensive speakers, the Synergy Series of Everest Models use compression horns for the transducer responsible for 85% of the audible bandwidth. Top Klipsch always has.
Do mom jeans give better dynamics?
Well that is uncertain, when you finish your research please report back.
They make them butts look more dynamic.
Horns ALWAYS distorts the sound as Paul is proving.
I would NOT have one in my system!!!
No they don't.
us and them they really don’t, most high end hundred thousand dollar and up speakers are horn speakers
Your loss.
You seem pretty confident about your system and opinionated over the long haul. It would be interesting to know how you got there.
@@InsideOfMyOwnMind Sounds like the old high school argument of my day: A 454 is better than a 350. Has to be, it is bigger...
IF the good people that designed and built the Infinity IRS5 speakers
thought horns were a great benefit, they would be incorporated in them.
They ARE NOT of ANY benefit, so they weren't