By the way folks, this is the fellow and his system whose awesome system I listened to, and who returned the favor by listening and critiquing mine. He gave the Triton's a BIG thumbs up. This coming from a person where one of his driver's is comparable in cost to a T1.



I have photos of myself at his place standing next to the system, but was never able to attach them.

Wow! Thanks for posting this. What a system! I can't even begin to understand the engineering that went into that. He really knows his stuff.

I do wonder about reflections off the floors. Not necessarily vibration of the floors (he says there is none), but some of that high frequency energy may reflect and muddy things up a little.

I really like what he has done with time alignment. The sound of fast transients must be very tight.

What was your impression on the transient sharpness (for want of a better word)?

I recently got a DSPeaker Anti-Mode X4 and spent a lot of time getting filters designed to get it maximally flat. I noticed an improvement in transient response with that. Very sharp, very clear.

Wow, GDHAL

Thanks for sharing! That is one very impressive project! Must have sounded job shelf.

Rick

Thanks, @charliehatch. And yes, Wow!

He is but one member of an audio club that I too am a member of (Audio Syndrome, based in Long Island NY, USA). Believe it or not the club has about 50 members, and about 15 have systems that exceed 50K in overall (if not speakers alone) cost. Joe is one of them. My system cost is a much more modest at $25K all in. Some members of Audio Syndrome have boasted speakers at the $200K MSRP price point.

As far as Joe's horn system is concerned, admittedly I have little to no experience listening to a horn system. My idea in listening to his system (and other members with $+50K systems) is simply for me to compare - in my own mind and albeit subjectively - the sound to that of my system (keep in mind GoldenEar marketing has traditionally stated that their speakers are comparable to speakers costing many multiples of theirs. Five times is certainly not unheard of and realistic to expect.)

In the case of Joe's DIY horns, in general I would say that overall his room treatments are very effective. Listen to his explanation at the 11:50 mark (and for minutes thereafter) in the video. Personally, I didn't get the sense that the room was detracting from the sound or adding any kind of coloration. And by the way, there is another youtube video of his basement, where he shows off the machinery he has to proove that he does in fact have the tooling to make virtually anything out of metal and wood.

The transients of his horns are fanastic. Perfect in fact. I can't imagine how transients could be improved in his case. Transients is what *he* claims cannot be reproduced as accurately in any other type of speaker system besides horns. Hence this is part of the reason I wanted to listen to his horn system and then have him listen to mine.

My take away from the one listening session (1.5 hours random music) I did at his place was that the presentation of his horns are immense and that there certainly is something to be said of horns and an ultra high efficiency system (he claims 106 - 108+db) that I cannot describe except to say it has to be heard to be understood/experienced.

If you would like to contact him (Joe) directly with further questions, etc. I'd be happy to PM you his contact credentials.

GDHAL, one question that came to me later is, with all the crossovers he has, are all the drivers in phase with transients? I'm not very knowledgeable about crossover design, but I have seen some Stereophile reviews that show some drivers out of phase. In phase seems ideal to me. If you don't know, fine, I'm just curious.

charliehatch wrote: GDHAL, one question that came to me later is, with all the crossovers he has, are all the drivers in phase with transients? I'm not very knowledgeable about crossover design, but I have seen some Stereophile reviews that show some drivers out of phase. In phase seems ideal to me. If you don't know, fine, I'm just curious.

I have no idea. This is why I say that if you would like to contact him (Joe) directly with further questions, etc. I'd be happy to PM you his contact credentials.