House of Horns

Welcome to PerkAudio’s House of Horns. My name is Lloyd Perkins and I created this domain and webpages to share the results of my research, my designs and the knowledge that I have gain over the years of study in Sound System Engineering and the design of speaker cabinets.

Horn loading has been my focus in speaker design because of some advantages that I have listed below.
This includes the design front loaded horns, folded horns, band-pass horns, tapped horns and W-Bin.

Increased sensitivity

  1. Horns provide up to 20% efficiency where direct radial only provides of about 2% efficiency .
  2. This means that less power is required for equal SPL of direct radiating.
  3. For every 3 dB increase in efficiency, power requirement is reduced by half.
  4. The diaphragm moves less than a direct radiating diaphragm of equal size.
  5. This is a factor because cone movement increases 4 times for each octave decrease.

Decrease excursions of a speaker, provides the following improved properties

  1. Distortion from a driver is proportional to excursion magnitude.
  2. Handles signal peaks and high outputs more ideally
  3. Reduction of doppler distortion
  4. Reduction of harmonic distortion

Allows for increased amplifier headroom

  1. Increased headroom means more dynamics

Increased directional characteristic

  1. Directs sound into a narrower beam
  2. Increases on-axis sensitivity (SPL/1W/1m).
  3. Provides medium to long throw characteristics

Horn systems are capable of giving a closer approximation of musical reality

HOH Animation2PerkAudio – Live Sound Consulting <> PerkHorns – Pro Speaker Design           lloyd@perkaudio.net