What are the pro/cons of having horn drivers in your system?

Also anyone know exactly what a "flat cone passive radiator" is?


Thanks

hors tend to image very well, and play very low for a tweeter...big and hard to mount though...a passive rad is basically a sub with no magnet, in a box...it works very similar to a port, but the tuning freq is adjusted by the weight of the cone.

oooohhhh--careful Ty, people have been hung for calling HLCD's tweeters... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Pro's of HLCD's- Incredible dynamics, precise imaging, staging, depth, high sensitivity, cover a broad range of the frequency spectrum.

Cons- Stage width(depending on install/type of horn), tonality can be an issue, work best with expensive processors, some find them harder to tune, I find them a lot easier...

I have used Veritas, Image Dynamics, and USD horns, and would take any one of them over a conventional component set. I find that HLCD's add a sense of realism to music, that just isn't there with conventional speakers. Hard to explain, you either love em or hate em...

What are your plans?

Passive radiators look impressive , especially in home audio.

I know lots of people that think they have 2 working woofers in each speaker, and actually one is the radiator , like ICON says, it works the same as a port.

I have a Labtech computer speaker and the woofer is an 8" passive radiator driven by a 4" woofer

And stupid me , i saw the 8" woofer and thought i was buying a 8" subwoofer.

actually, it was me that said that...and kris? hlcd is just jibberish for "big tweeter" ;) [img]tongue.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/deal4u.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/beer.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/thumb.gif[/img] :cool:

I was playing with the idea of getting some horn drivers and mounting them behind the dash of my YJ. If I do this they would have to be pointed downward so I dont know how good that is for imaging. The only way to know for sure is to try it and see. If all they did was add some extra frequencies (wouldnt even have to be directional) and improve sq id be happy.
If anyone has had good experiences...or bad experiences using horn drivers in a certain application feel free to comment.

Horns are highly directional, the whole idea behind the horn lense is to focus the sound in a specific pattern...You would pretty much be defeating the purpose of using a horn if you didn't have it mounted properly, you'd be better off with a good set of components...

^ This is true but if the horn driver produces a concentrated soundwave and is directional, if placed at a slight angle some of the sound will be reflected back up which will add to the total sound produced by the rest of the speakers. In my case the bottom of the dash is relatively close to the floor of the cabin which should allow for the sound wave to be reflected quite well without alot of loss due to distance. But again, id have to try and see, it might end up sounding like a$$. [img]graemlins/headbang.gif[/img]

There was a pickup truck on the IASCA cicut a while back that had a pair of horns mounted under the seats firing towards the dash, a similar idea to yours I suppose...Who knows it may work, but I would imagine it would take a lot of work to get right...

Are you sure there is no way to mount a pair of minihorns the conventional way under the dash? What are you driving?

Im driving an 88 Jeep YJ, I guess I could frabricate something so that the horns face forward but under the dash would be a quick and easy fit, but yeah I would be getting smaller horns, cant fit too much under there.