folded horns and HF drivers = ?

[bikehorn]

to my knowledge, folded horns are generally designed for low end extension only, though i know there are exceptions. i recently came across a picture of a University Classic with what looked like some paging horns on the front. obviously, this is to improve high frequency response, but how good will it sound? i've seen old Orange 1x15 W-horns in old 70's era catalogues of theirs with built in HF horns being used as full range PA.

 

here is the University Classic:

 

 

using those institutional looking paging horns doesn't look like it will sound good, but i could be wrong. what is the story here?

[bikehorn]

NB: the picture won't work, but if you go to http://www.geocities.com/loudspeakerguru/ and go to roughly the bottom of the page and find on the left "Link to photo of University Classic (S8) ". there's the pic.

[agedhorse]

Back then, efficiency was often more important than sound quality. Amp power was very expensive (about 10x what it is now) so the effort went into making speakers more efficient.

 

Those speakers generally sounded pretty dreadful, especially without eq and with the (generally) poor mic selection. I would guess that those speakers were first sold about 35-40 years ago.

[tlbonehead]

Yes,that was long ago and oh so far away! For one thing,it looks like there would be poor phasing alignment. But as Andy stated,the trade-offs were much larger then in the tone vs efficiency thing. And since the days of those speakers,a lot of 2-way FH/high horn(or 3-way with an added super tweeter like a lot of the E-V designs)models have come and gone. E-V had a number of popular models,including some of the Sentry models as well as the original Eliminator. And Peavey had one that was extremely popular for a while in maybe the late 70's-early 80's. Can't recall the model but it was basically an FH1 with a large horn on top. Sounded terrible to me. The low horn was too small for good low end and then there was the typical hole in the lower mids. One other thing to remember also was that in those days the horn ordinarily came in at a lot lower frequency than is normal these days. Anything over 1000hz seemed like a high frequency back then. Which made the mid frequency hole a little smaller than what might be the case today with all the 1" titanium drivers being used.

[agedhorse]

And the drivers used phenolic diaphrams in order to hold together at those lower frequencies. Top end stopped at 10k, and the distortion was terrible... but they were loud enough to be useable.

[bikehorn]

thanks guys.

 

from your descriptions, i'm guessing that layout sounded as bad as a set of Shure Vocal Masters. man, what horrible sounding PA columns. they don't even have an HF driver!

[agedhorse]

 

Originally posted by bikehorn thanks guys. from your descriptions, i'm guessing that layout sounded as bad as a set of Shure Vocal Masters. man, what horrible sounding PA columns. they don't even have an HF driver!

 

 

But they got loud (relatively) with 100 watts of input.