Price Paid:  $700.00 from www.thehornshoppe.co

Summary:
I researched full range horn speakers for some time. Though I was impressed with the sound (for instance 8 inch Lowthers) the size of the cabinets and cost held me back.

Ed Shilling, the creator of the Horns has come up with a no-compromise solution - 4 inch full range drivers in a good looking and, mercifully, medium-sized cabinet.

The Horns simply don't disappoint. I listened to them for a year without subwoofer with great satisfaction. I have recently added an excellent subwoofer (from another system). While there is some improvement the original Horns have a natural and very satisfactory bass with some sensitivity to placement in the room. They are best driven with a low wattage tube amplifier. I have a LEAK Stereo 20 (with Telefunken tubes). The clarity, imaging and overall presence is phenomenal.

Ed is one of the best people you'll ever meet for honest advice and excellent after sales service.

Highly recommended.

Strengths:
Very natural sound with excellent imaging.

Vocals are stunningly real.

Price - no better deal on the market

After sales service - 100% satisfaction.

Weaknesses:
Sensitive to room placement - better for serious sit down listening than for background music for parties.

Bass is very natural but not enhanced to satisfy lovers of rock music. A good quality subwoofer can be added.

A very good low wattage amplifier is required preferably tube - these speakers will faithfully reflect the strengths of the components used to drive them.

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
PART 2

SETTING THE STANDARD

Because The Horn has only one driver, it is essentially a point source. This gives it the edge and ability to task imaging unlike anything you’ve ever heard with multiple drivers, including line source arrays. I have owned a lot of speakers over the years, and thought I knew what good imaging was. You have to experience The Horn to know what I’m talking about. Nothing from Magnepan to mini monitors can image like The Horn.

Some manufactures attempt to time align their drivers, but this doesn’t even come close to being the same thing as the sound still comes from more than one location. Think of it this way, the entire range of the human voice comes from only one mouth, not from two or three separate holes in the head (or body) lined up on a vertical plain. On this point alone, the logic of multi driver systems is inherently flawed from the get go. No amount of ingenuity can alter or compensate for the laws of physics. Experience The Horn!

At the output terminals of your amplifier, the electrical signal is complete and ready to become mechanical energy. With The Horn this is exactly what happens. However when a signal gets butchered by a crossover and delivered to multiple drivers, it becomes filtered, reconstituted and enriched with distortion. Every electronic part including the circuit board they are mounted on will affect and add it’s own signature the signal delivered from your amplifier.

This damage the integrity of the amplifiers signal is very audible. Listen to The Horn and you will soon discover just how much a crossover can corrupt the signal from your amplifier. Crossovers implemented in the mid range are evil, a black curse on audio resolution. If used beyond the jurisdiction 120 Hz, they are nothing more than a lame excuse to merge multiple inadequate drivers for compromised performance.

As The Horns do not have a crossover they are ruthlessly revealing. This is clearly evident in the midrange where conventional two way systems are crossed over. With The Horns, vocals take on a presence that is so uncanny you’ll swear the artist is in your room performing live without a microphone. I have yet to hear a conventional 2 or 3 way speaker at any price point that can equal The Horn in this regard. The single driver and lack of a crossover is so coherent and true you’d think you radically upgraded your electronics upstream.

The original 4” driver had a maximum frequency response of 17K. That’s high enough for most people, but the new driver shoots up to 20K. Regardless, the high frequencies sound as clean and crisp as anything I’ve heard from the best tweeters, including the very same tweeter mounted in Focal’s JM Lab Grande Utopia. Low frequency extension reaches 70 Hz at which point it falls off sharply. By placing The Horn in the corner, you can reach 50Hz, however like many discriminating audiophiles, I like my speakers positioned well out into the room, as far as possible from the walls.

Even though the quantity of bass doesn't dig as deep as I'd like it to, I am stunned by the quality of the bass by The Horn. A 4" driver doesn't muddle the bass like bigger drivers do. It's extremely clean, tight and responsive. If a sub were to be integrated, I wouldn't expect much unless it was capable of the same excellence in its range as The Horns do within their range. So of course The Horn Shoppe also makes a Horn Line augmenter for The Horn. It too utilizes a small driver and provides seamless integration down to 30Hz.

CONTINUED BELOW

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
PART 3

COMPARED TO WHAT ??

I have heard a variety of electrostatic speakers over the years -which by the way are usually single drivers operating within the same range of The Horn. Electrostats are very coherent but unlike The Horn they are not very efficient and require a very stable amplification as the impedance tends to be all over the map. The other concern with electrostats is that they lack dynamic range. Even if you never heard live drums in your life you’ll quickly recognize something is terribly wrong when you hear them through electrostats. Electrostats are great –within their limitations.

That’s the great thing about The Horn. Regardless of your mood, musical preference, or how loud you like to listen, The Horn can convincingly play any kind of music with a supernatural realism that is very difficult to describe. Ed Schilling, father and creator of The Horn has measured sound pressure levels of 115db sitting 15’ back. It takes tremendous power do that, in excess 500 watts. Yet The Horn is efficient enough to be driven reasonably loud with just a few watts as is the case with the excellent Decware Zen.

So here we have a small speaker with a single 4” driver, actually if you measure the diameter of the cone it’s more like 2.5”! You would think small speaker equates small sound stage, right? Wrong. Using a single ended triode amplifier with a total output power of less than 5 watts, I get a huge solid wall of sound. Lateral width and depth of field is astonishing. Of course placement in the room, the quality of amplification and components up stream will make a difference.

Although these speakers are not by far the most expensive I’ve ever bought, performance wise they surpass I everything ever owned or had the privilege to listen to. But before I owned or even had a chance to listen to The Horn, I read a post on Audio Asylum about a Horn owner who had made some intriguing comments about his Horns. He compared them very favorably to his Martian Logan CLS (5K) and his Wilson Watt Puppies (20K). I was very skeptical but his remarks caught my attention.

I had also heard some other reports coming from people that owned the highly esteemed Magnepan 1.6 QRs, New Form Ribbons and many other highly regarded speakers boasting great value according to the audio magazines. Then one day I had the opportunity to hear them for myself. My skepticism stayed with me right up until I heard Anne Wilson’s voice coming out of The Horn. It was so live, so real and present it completely took hold of me and blew me away like an adolescent experiencing his first orgasm!

A speaker ought to reveal what it has been given. And once you’ve heard The Horn it is utterly shocking how bad even the so called “best speakers” fall short of this mark.

Ed Schilling at The Horn Shoppe sells these with a no hassle 30 day money back guarantee. You can find out more by visiting… www.thehornshoppe.com

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
PART 4

ADDENDUM

To further increase the resolution of these speakers, Ed suggested I bypass the binding posts by drilling a small hole (big enough for the speaker leads to pass through) 0.5” behind each terminal of the binding posts. Then by using the binding posts merely as clamps, you can touch the speaker leads directly to the leads of the driver and lock the connection tight without having to pass the signal through the binding posts.

This little tweak worked so well I performed it on my amplifier as well. The difference is very apparent, however cosmetically there is a price to pay as things get altered. The following link illustrates what this modification looks like on my speakers.

http://groups.msn.com/SightUnseenSeemlyVisual/shoebox.msnw?actio n=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=2

If you are interested in furthering the performance of these magnificent speakers beyond this, you might want to consider installing Bybee Quantum Purifiers on each driver…

www.bybeetech.com

Von Schweikert puts these in their statement/flagship model DB 100 (10K) and Marten Design puts them in their statement/flagship model Coltrane (40K), I installed one on each driver in my Horns too. And yes, they do contribute to even higher resolution. So even if you can’t buy into Bybee’s explanation as to how and why they work, you might want to try them anyhow. They too have a thirty day money back guarantee like The Horns

There is another device known as the ZERO Autotransformer that comes with the same thirty day money back guarantee. The ZEROs were designed for OTL (output transformerless) amplifiers to multiply the speakers impedance by 2, 3, or 4 times so the amplifier can work at its optimum.

www.zeroimpedance.com

I use the ZEROs in reverse to lower the impedance my amplifier sees as it strangely enough prefers and performs better a 2 ohm load! Whether the ZEROs will benefit your system or not largely depends on the amplifier and its optimum operating range.

Finally, it’s worth repeating that Ed does have a bass augmenter (not a sub) available to fill in that part of the first octave that is out of the range of The Horn.

Strengths:
Incredible coherancy, speed, dynamics, revealing layers of detail in spades. Sound stage and imaging to die for! Efficient enough to be driven by almost anything including flea amps. Incredible mind boggling value.

Weaknesses:
Limited low frequency response, however the quality of bass that is in there range is outstanding

Price Paid:  $700.00 from Hornshoppe

Summary:
I first read about this speaker in Art Dudley's Listener audio journal. I was intriqued as Ed was using a driver with a lineage that I had a long term familiarity with (Foster/Fostex). I called Ed up and after a bit of banter about musical tastes, gear and wood finishing, I ordered a pair. Ed did a great job matching the finish of the furniture I already had in my living/listening room. Although Ed prepared me that they would require a lengthy break in, I was immediately awestruck at the huge soundstage and transparency of the sound! I've had them now since Oct. 2000 and have since made a few modifications to them (Ed is constantly improving upon his product). I have added a 20-gram roll of Acousta-Stuf just behind the driver to minimize midrange shout from the horn, upgraded the internal wiring and also added 23 lbs. of 7.5 lead shot to the bottom cavity of each enclosure. I also added steel spikes. These mods vastly improved the bottom end and cleaned up the overall sound. Ed's early models had a "treatment" applied to the cones. I changed mine out for stock FE-108Z's. (He has since discontinued this practice and there has been a upgrade to the Fostex driver he now uses.) I have carefully measured the in-room response of my system and the results were a very impressive 55 to 18,000 Hz +/-3dB. And this is from a four inch driver! Oh, and if you are worried about acoustic output, I have measured over 100dB of SPL at TWO meters distance! The build quality is rock solid. The fit and finish on mine have that home-grown, hand-sewn quality to it, but that's alright. They exude character in every regard! A very lively presentation with enough finesse to leave you with the impression that you actually heard the singer in your room! BTW, I am using these with a McIntosh CDP directly driving a Pass Labs Aleph 30 SE power amp.

Strengths:
Dynamics, realism and Ed's total support.
Very tweakable.

Weaknesses:
Long break in time. May have moderate WAF (I think they look classy). Some may want to add a Sub for the final bottom octave.