High Efficiency Speaker Asylum: A few directionality observations by Duke Need speakers that can rock with just one watt? You found da place.

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Posted by Duke (D ) on November 4, 2003 at 09:23:49

In Reply to: Re: Looking for good 2" compression driver?? posted by Hornlover on November 4, 2003 at 08:37:06:

If you use a round horn, then a 2" throat driver will beam above about 6 or 7 kHz. The BMS 4590 tries to get around this by using a concentric driver - a 1" dome inside a 2" ring radiator - but I haven't been able to get a smooth transition between the two radiating elements.

So if you want wide high frequency coverage with a 2" throat driver, then you need a horn geometry that addresses the issue. Horns with vanes or lenses were used in the past to get good high frequency coverage (notably by JBL and Altec), and the TAD TH4001 still uses vanes. Multicell horns also gave improved high frequency coverage. Today such designs have largely been supplanted by diffraction horns, for ease of manufacture and (often but not always) lower coloration. As in all things audio, the name of the game is tradeoffs. If you want to use a 2" throat driver to cover the entire upper range, then you must choose between the wider high frequency coverage of a wide-pattern rectangular horn and the lower coloration of a round horn. With 2" throat drivers I lean towards constant-directivity diffraction horns, whereas with 1" throat drivers the high frequency coverage will be wide enough to allow the use of round constant-directivity horns.

There are some generalizations in the above statements, of course.

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