My favorites are horns with fairly wide dispersion. I don't particularly care for horn setups (or any kind of speaker, for that matter) that requires the listener to be in a very small "sweet spot." When I listen to a system, I rarely sit exactly on-axis, and sometimes the owner will instruct me to move into the preferred spot. But I am actually sitting there because I judge a system by off-axis performance as much as any other attribute.

To me, part of the goal is to make the system sound as good 10°, 20° and even 30° off-axis as it does on-axis. I am looking for a speaker that charges the reverberent field uniformly because it sounds far more natural than one that doesn't, in my opinion. If you have to sit in a half-meter wide sweet spot for the system to sound good, I'm not particularly impressed.

I know that some, if not most, audiophiles expect the listener to be seated in that one "perfect spot." Why would someone settle for only having good imaging and proper tonal balance in a "sweet spot" when they can have that same kind of performance over a wider range? I expect this kind of thing from planars and soft domes, but from horns? I see it as a throw back to technologies of 50 years ago. A good horn system has directionality that controls the pattern and fills the room without excessive wall and floor reflections. Horns offer a possibility of creating a good field of sound instead of a good line of sound.

So that's the flavor that gets my vote. I like horns, and I like them designed to cover the room. In addition to tonal balance and low distortion, a uniformly charged reverberent field is very important to me.

Until I build them myself however I wont be able to- my city/country has so little audio nuts like myself!

-Perhaps when im finished studying and earning il be finally able to sort this out!

Cheers
Mike.e

But I haven't heard a speaker that will do justice to everything. For instance, I like Khorns best for large orchestral music, but for “small” music they don’t seem very realistic. Since I listen to a lot of jazz combo, I like open baffles these days. Horn-over-reflex speakers (e.g. Pi speakers) seem to be the only thing for rock-n’-roll.

If I were Bill Gates I’d have the same size house, but many different spaces with many different set-ups.

The funny thing is that the CD sounds so LP - you'd swear you're listening to an LP.

I have no idea what that effect is, but it made it clear to me that CD and LP can certainly sound the same if that's your objective.