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High Efficiency Speaker Asylum: Re: On Dinsdale on Horns. by Paul Eizik

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Re: On Dinsdale on Horns.

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Bruce

I have'nt gone over to the dark side, honest! Back in 1974 (at the time of Dinsdale's articles) my Dad had dismantled his horn rig, as my Mother had gotten sick of the sight of big raw plywood boxes in the living room for 10 years (she was very patient). I started cobling my horns together as a P.A. system about 1977, the same year "Suitability of Low-Frequency Drivers for Horn-Loudspeaker Systems" by R.H. Small was presented to the A.E.S. I did'nt read Small's paper untill last year as I previously thought you had to be a member of the AES to get the papers. It looks like Dinsdale just picked some good drivers that were handy just as I did, but I lucked out and picked some EV 15B's which were on sale due to my intended P.A. use. It seems that you had your great horn revelation about 1978, but I did'nt get my horns up and running untill late '79 during a very cold spell here (-25 below). I put one together and was astounded that it totally overpowerd one of my Altec direct radiator Model 9's, I could'nt even hear that the Altec was playing! The other horn was quickly assembled, and the resulting rig crowded out the Altecs as my main system. The whole thing was a bit on the rough side (to put it very mildly from todays perspective, but it had that "big sound" that my Dad's rig did) and I could'nt think of what to do about this untill I orderd some back issues of Audio Amateur and Speaker Builder and became one of the horn hungry few who eagerly awaitd your once a year articles and occasional answers to letters. Any practical horn info was hard to come by in those days, resulting in a lot of guess work. I have to look at the Dinsdale articles in this context.

A while ago there was a link here to a European horn site supplied by Bill Geiger (Bill, we miss you!) which featured a ceramic brick wall horn. The designer outlined his design protocol and settled on the tractrix contour for the bass horn, rejecting the hyperbolic for what he felt was it's high distortion. I immediately thought "Dinsdale", and "this guy has'nt read Edgar obviously". Anyway it's good to see your critique of Dinsdale here (I've heard it in your talks), as I would hate to have a multi ton brick tractrix bass horn in my basement. I hope our European readers see this, as the wrong horn costs and weighs just as much as the right one does.

Paul


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Topic - On Dinsdale on Horns. (long) - Paul Eizik 13:44:02 04/16/03 ( 14)