Horn Loading Revisited

EE 44 September 1987 HORN LOADING REVISITED by R.M. Harris, B.Sc. Horn loudspeakers provide good low-frequency performance and high efficiency, but are impractical for many uses because they are very large. However, R.M. Harris describes a design that is suitable for use in an ordinary living room. The weakest link in any hi-fi system is undoubtedly the acoustical transducer or loud- speaker. Sound recording tech- nology is reaching new levels of precision and noise re- duction with digital recording and compact discs. Amplifiers can be perfected to almost any degree, if the price is right, with hitherto unheard of purity in terms of harmonic distortion and intermodulation products. In other words, it is possible to reproduce sound faithfully from DC to RF, but only in terms of electrical signals. For, while electronic technology has passed from thermionic valves through discrete transistors to integrated circuits, the loud- speaker has hardly changed in its essentials since its i...