Because I'm the OP, I'm going to stick with the original question, and will politely decline all offers to check out the latest horn speaker offerings. I want to understand what is it about the horn speaker sound I so much dislike.
Do you have any idea what contributes to that "horn sound" I talked about? I recently heard GedLee Abbeys (the horn lovers, excuse me, the waveguide lovers speak highly of these speakers) and they had that characteristic unpleasant sound.
When I heard these
GedLee Abbeys, I heard some music that contained a prominent clarinet passage. It sounded like a clarinet being played in a large public restroom with tile walls and floors. I made an effort to walk all about the room and I heard this unpleasant sound no matter where I was. (I played a clarinet in high school, and I know first hand what this sounds like
.) I was trying my best not to violate the number 1 rule of audio –
Never Say Anything Bad About Another Man's Speakers While He's Invited You To Listen To Them – but when he asked what I thought, I had to work hard coming up with something irrelevant and distracting. I talked about how good his amp (vacuum tubes) and speaker cables seemed
. (This guy doesn't like Audioholics, so I believe he won't see this
.) Fortunately, I did have to leave soon, so I didn't have to keep up the fiction that I liked them for long. It took me about 2 seconds to know they were ear fatigue waiting to happen.
The Abbeys, are large 2-way speakers with what looks like a PA type 12" woofer and a 1" (?) compression tweeter mounted in a round waveguide that looks the same diameter as the woofer. The web site shows these two frequency response graphs, one is the usual type (albeit stretched out horizontally), and the other is the Geddes-type multi-color plot.
The crossover is apparently between 600 and 700 Hz. The upper graph looks reasonable – nothing unusual stands out that might contribute to "that horn sound". The Geddes-type graph shows a prominent ridge between 400 and 500 Hz where the sound dispersal becomes noticeably less dispersed, but that would be below the crossover frequency. So I am not sure I see anything that might be a problem.
I once read that horn mounted tweeters
can generate a resonance whose frequency is related to the perimeter of the horn, but I can't remember anything else about that. Does this idea ring a bell with anyone? Is this at all related to "that horn sound"?