15 or not 15? What do you think?

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Not even. There are four inchers that would give good lows if the horn is large enough, but their small displacement would limit their output. Even horn loaded eight inches is the smallest practical size.

[Stub Mandrel]

19 hours ago, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

Not even. There are four inchers that would give good lows if the horn is large enough, but their small displacement would limit their output. Even horn loaded eight inches is the smallest practical size.

 

For portable amps. A few inches is enough for permanently installed horns, like they used to use in cinemas.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Said horns were typically loaded with fifteens. For instance the Altec A7, or going back further the Shearer horn.

[Dan Dare]

5 hours ago, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

Said horns were typically loaded with fifteens. For instance the Altec A7, or going back further the Shearer horn.

 

True. I've recounted this on here previously, but when I played the Hammersmith Odeon (now Apollo) many years ago, they still had the old horn speakers standing unused in the wings. They were massive. I could easily have crawled into the horn throats.

[Bankai]

Reassuringly heavy..

 

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

 when I played the Hammersmith Odeon (now Apollo) many years ago, they still had the old horn speakers standing unused in the wings. They were massive. I could easily have crawled into the horn throats.

The mouths. The throat is the small end where the drivers are mounted. Advances in driver technology allow us to use smaller drivers in horns just as in other cab styles, so where a fifteen might have been required 50 years ago a ten would work as well today. But you're not going to get 130dB at 30Hz from a 4 inch driver, no matter how large the horn.

[Steve Browning]

2 hours ago, Bankai said:

Reassuringly heavy..

 

That is the best bass cabinet ever made, IMHO. Every bass player should have the opportunity to play through one of those. 

[3below]

Reassuringly light, 2 x Eminence 3015LF, endless volume.  No tweetery top end which suits my bass tone.  Best bass cab I own.

 

Edited yesterday at 20:34 by 3below

[Dan Dare]

18 hours ago, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

The mouths. The throat is the small end where the drivers are mounted. Advances in driver technology allow us to use smaller drivers in horns just as in other cab styles, so where a fifteen might have been required 50 years ago a ten would work as well today. But you're not going to get 130dB at 30Hz from a 4 inch driver, no matter how large the horn.

 

I could have almost fitted into the narrow ends. They had 15" drivers, so the throats were very large. The fronts of the horns had about the same frontal area as a small car and they were mounted on large scaffolding stands that placed them about 10' in the air. Impressive. I just hope they didn't end up in a dumpster.

[Stub Mandrel]

On 18/05/2025 at 14:41, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

Not even. There are four inchers that would give good lows if the horn is large enough, but their small displacement would limit their output. Even horn loaded eight inches is the smallest practical size.

 

I've been fast and loose based on my memories of books read in my teens/twenties and written in the seventies. I think my wires got crossed between some of the different case studies. I am pretty sure I am right about a blind test with an audience where they matched a 10W output to the volume of a small orchestra.

Looking around, Lowther do 5 and 8-inch drivers for enclosures that cost about the same as a luxury car that claim 35Hz...

Horns can be crazy things... these PA horns were my grandfather's, then father's, and were still being hired out (with new drivers) for equestrian events a couple of years ago, because they sounded far better than modern speakers in that application. The photos would be early/mid-1950s.

 

 

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Lowthers  are typically used in hi-fi rear loaded folded horns. They'll go reasonably low but only living room loud. The pictured PA horns use compression drivers, perhaps good to 200Hz. That's fine for that application, but not so much for music. In their case they really are PA, as in Public Address.

[Stub Mandrel]

1 hour ago, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

Lowthers  are typically used in hi-fi rear loaded folded horns. They'll go reasonably low but only living room loud. The pictured PA horns use compression drivers, perhaps good to 200Hz. That's fine for that application, but not so much for music. In their case they really are PA, as in Public Address.

 

The Lowthers came up as what seem to be 'state of the art' for hifi horns when I tried to find my original source, which seems to have been lost in history :-(

Absolutely, they exemplify the original meaning of PA - clear speech under difficult outdoor conditions. Apparently the chap who used them (up until his untimely death) found they carried much better and dealt with light winds a lot better than modern 'boxes'.

[crazycloud]

1 hour ago, Stub Mandrel said:

The Lowthers came up as what seem to be 'state of the art' for hifi horns

Lowthers weren't remotely SOTA hifi 50ya let alone what you can do with horns these days.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Lowther, and many Fostex models as well, are primarily aimed at audiophools who are convinced of the need for single driver hi-fi cabs. To extend the highs they use small very light cones. That also gives low Qes/Qts for high sensitivity, but with weak lows. To get the lows up to a useful level they put them into rear loaded folded horns. The high sensitivity is useful with very low power valve amps, over which audiophools also wax poetic. But these are the same blokes who'll pay 100 quid or more a meter for cables. They're easily bested with two or three way ported speakers and modern amplification.