The modern speakers are much better, aren't they? My prejudice was there, these are not my speakers ! All these old full-range drivers (such as Philips made them) they only yell at you. I had heard of them, but never thought about them as really being of any interest. It did have something special though, spacial, open and very musical.Īfter that a while nothing, I played with some ideas, but all that changed when I noticed Lowther.

This system didn't enjoy a long life, I couldn't bear it's resonance around 2500 Hz for a long time. The choice fell upon a minuscule wide-band speaker (Jordan JX-51) which because of its size needed some help from, of course, a horn. The next system had to be smaller and still WITHOUT any filters. My wife didn't mind, she was happy that these monsters (2 meters high) had left the living-room! Somehow I didn't mind because they started to annoy me for their size and the lack of sound-pressure. My first wide-band was an electrostatic one, perfect ! The sound was clear, visible and wide! I listened to them with great pleasure until my dog decided to mark the things and caused their breakdown. Long ago I abandoned these multi-way systems and found my truth in wide-band systems. Add a capacitor and some other parts to eliminate things we don't want to hear (woofers seem to have some break-up problems we don't like or the tweeter resonances disturbs the filter-behavior) resulting in a system that measures perfectly but doesn't sound at all. A simple coil already takes the life out of the musical performance. This because they don't used electronically filters. I have a great passion for wide-band systems. This is something that spooked in my head for years already and is the reason why I developed a front horn for this area too for combining with my horn loaded bass design (my old friend the sub-horn who brings the best below 150 Hz and down!) Because speakers require air-contact (at wavelengths larger than the circumference of the moving diaphragm) to perform optimal it is likely that the horn-principle as used for the bass will benefit in the mid/low performance as well.

Tractrix horn design