Well there are a lot of DIY which are rubbish. Good thing is only one needs to be good.
Hi Bonzo,
Yep, good is good, but “good” often comes with additional baggage, especially with horns.
As I’ve previously mentioned, when we sold the big dumb system we used Living Voice OBX-RWs for a time as a single constant variable in order to swap various components in and out of what would become knows as the “experimental” system. The purpose of which was to work out what I liked and didn’t like, and more importantly,
why I liked what I liked and didn’t like. That eventually lead me toward the DIY world, and through a friend was introduced to some practitioners (as opposed to theoreticians) who were fooling around with DIY horns and DIY SETs.
During that process, I figured out that I preferred idlers to DDs and belt-drives. I preferred Koetsu’s on heavy arms to zingy carts on univpivots. I preferred custom wound SUTs to internal impedance switches. I preferred active line stages to passive ones. I preferred output transformers to having none. I preferred R2R DACs to Delta-Sigma ones. I preferred multi-tap transformers/autoformers to volume pots. I preferred interstage transformers to cap-coupling. I preferred linear power supplies to switch-mode ones. I preferred no feedback to any form of local or global feedback. I preferred directly-heated triodes to indirectly-heated ones. I figured out that implementation beat topology, and topology beat exotic parts.
I also figured out I really wanted horns.
It was this collective experience that convinced me to leave behind the world of “mainstream” hi-fi (at least as represented by the mainstream hi-fi press) and pursue a system based not on ideas, but their implementation. In order for me to realise the type of sound I wanted, I’d be looking for a designer - not a brand, not a topology and not an acronym or buzz-word made up by a marketing company - at least when it came to amps and digital.
But when it came to DIY horns, there were several aspects that prevented me from being so willing to go down that path - despite the fact the best of them were absolutely convincing in terms of what matters most to me, musically speaking.
Firstly, they were all massive. Were I looking at a future of bachelor-hood in an abandoned warehouse, that would be fine. Given that I’m not, the impractical realities of accommodating OB/W-Cab/Slot-Loaded enclosures with multiple 15” and 18” drivers made them instantly redundant for my purposes. (Not a fan of Onkens.)
Secondly, many were very complex. Three-, four- and five-way systems, amplified by multiple channels, often with line-level crossovers. Time and phase alignment was a huge issue, requiring each individual driver to be mounted independently or co-dependently with support structures that presented complexities in-and-of-themselves. For those that were assembled using passive crossovers, cut-off frequencies and slopes were complex to work out, made more difficult by the shape/size of the horn and the challenge of gathering objective data given all measurements were performed in-situ.
Thirdly, all of them were continuing works in progress. These were guys who were fascinated by the question of “But what if I did this?” Were I still in touch with some of them today, I’m sure their systems would be vastly different. Their living-rooms resembled workshops. They cared very, very much about the process, and very, very little about any sort of final “product”. The results they were able to produce were great - amazing even - but their nature as inveterate tinkerers clearly delineated the differences of approach and personality. I simply don’t have the time, energy or engineering chops to do what they do, and nor do I want to.
Nevertheless, the preferences that developed during my experimental system years lead me to shortlist a few small practitioners who most aligned with what I was looking for. As I’ve written before, that person and his company best realised those accumulated biases, and made a horn that suffered from none of the three issues of size, complexity and being a continued WIP. In terms of a real-world product, built and assembled with the sort of engineering capability many DIY practitioners lack (through no fault of their own), it’s become a very easy choice.
That’s not to say that a DIY horn cannot produce great sound and musically communicative experiences, and it’s not to say a DIYer can’t bring chops to play that sometimes embarrass what passes for “engineering” from many pseudo-horn “specialists” that are simply hugely compromised (and yes, for me, unjustifiably expensive). It just means they’re not for me.
Be well,
853guy