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What happened to the folded horn Cabs?

#41
alexclaber said:
Wow! I have never seen a photo of the 16H in the wild! Are you sure you need that 8x5" on top as well? ;)

People often comment on big horn subs 'throwing' the sound a distance so you don't hear/feel it so much onstage but that's a physical impossibility - the sound is always loudest at the source. The reduced distortion common to good horn subs does make it harder to locate them and if you stand in a boundary null then you might think the sound is being 'thrown' but it isn't.
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Supposedly long throw rear firing speaker cabs do not develop the sound wave for bass until several feet away - With my old acoustic cab , I used to do my sound check in the audience with guitarist playing so I could get a sense of the volume. But they can be loud nearby !
 
#42
Just got my first one! Sounds wonderful image.jpg
 
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#44
vasilio said:
Supposedly long throw rear firing speaker cabs do not develop the sound wave for bass until several feet away - With my old acoustic cab , I used to do my sound check in the audience with guitarist playing so I could get a sense of the volume. But they can be loud nearby !
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It can seem like that but that's not really what's going on. It's their lack of harmonic distortion that our ear keys off of that makes them seem to lack a punch or "immediate" feeling to the sound. It's basically because they play really clean, to the point where sometimes you kind of don't realize how much low frequency you've been exposed to until you get away from it for a while and your organs stop oscillating.
 
#45
vasilio said:
Supposedly long throw rear firing speaker cabs do not develop the sound wave for bass until several feet away - With my old acoustic cab , I used to do my sound check in the audience with guitarist playing so I could get a sense of the volume. But they can be loud nearby !
Click to expand...

Always a good idea to test out in the crowd area, but what you are encountering is most likely a dispersion issue, or bass cancellation zone issue. Again, what you are describing is a myth.

The only reason far field speakers need to be heard "far" to sound correct is when you have tops, mids, and bottoms, there is a point when all the waves from each driver correlate and the sound is coherent. This is why you don't see them on small recording room walls or atop the mixing console.
 
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#48
vasilio said:
Supposedly long throw rear firing speaker cabs do not develop the sound wave for bass until several feet away - With my old acoustic cab , I used to do my sound check in the audience with guitarist playing so I could get a sense of the volume. But they can be loud nearby !
Click to expand...

Yes, unfortunately it's one of those myths caused by other acoustic effects which are less easy to understand! "Horns throw sound" seems so obvious - but it's wrong.
 
#51
From a purely technical standpoint, the bass response of a horn depends on the size of the mouth. Thus you can't make them smaller without losing low end, even if you don't need the efficiency of a horn to reach the volume levels you need.

Many of us (perhaps most, if you count amateur / bedroom / jazz / coffeeshop players) who don't need that much sound, don't want to transport that much cab. A conventional ported cab offers a better way to manage the "small light low" tradeoff for our needs.
 
#57
ah, the days of the 360/301 or the 370/371 - yes they fit into back seats of land yachts

I remember that, for a while, I had one made by Orange (don't remember model #) - 18" folded

that was the days of bellbottoms flapping in the SPL goodness

BTW, its not a myth, there is a sort of dead area directly in front of these boxes - on a small stage where you'd be almost up against the thing you could feel it but not hear it - similar effect as side-by-side vs stacking vertically - the driver was only about thigh height
 
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#59
As the the low frequency waves "developing" thing:

Our ears hear pressure. Low frequency waves in a room cause standing waves. At some points (notably the walls) you can't have velocity (the wall bocks air movement, but you have pressure galore - thie incoming wave and outgoing wave add there, so you have more low end. Off the walls, where you are determines what frequencies you hear well, and what ones you don't hear much of. It's the distance from a wall that makes you not hear your rig on some notes at times, not that the waves need distance to develop. If you want to understand this better, set up your rig in a large field. You'll hear the low end in front of it fine, because there won't be walls to set up standing waves.
 
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#60
ZonieBass said:
I hope I'm using the correct terminology. I'm referring to the Bass cabs that usually had a single speaker that faced the rear of the cabinet. I had a Univox version of one many years ago and I believe Acoustic had one as well. Is it just that they weighed a ton? Were they not very efficient? Just curious, why you don't see them anymore. Thanks!
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FOH happened.
 
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