Hi Tony,

What can you suggest/supply for approx < £70 that competes with the above 2x drivers?

Priority is response close to the above, 9-16K.

Also, is there a cheap 1" plastic/pvc version of the B&C ME45 1" horn ?

Thought I saw you recommending one.

Cheers

The driver I would recommend would be the 4544 which is perfectly happy crossing as low as 1.3K with the right wave-guide.

A decent budget horn is the Celestion H1-9040P although if crossing >1.5K is low enough then I would recommend the Faital STH100, good value and also nicely cast Ali, a bit more expensive but IMHO worth it.

Tony

Thanks for that.

I'll be crossing into the 1" unit way above 2K, so low xover not needed, but need horn/driver solution that is very strong 10K+ like DE25+ME45.

You need to do more research on horn types and their effect on the Measured FR with regards dispersion, you are comparing apples with pears.

Tony Wilkes wrote:


OK.

So overall, which horn would you say will extract the best HF performance from the 4544.

Have looked at numerous FR graphs for 1" comps with horns, but still haven't found something that on average outperformed the B&C drivers.

That is because most FR's are shown on a CD horn which inevitably has a roll of with increasing frequency. This is an unfortunate side effect of the constant directionality geometry of the Horn.

The B&C horn has an exponential flare that allows a flatter response on-axis but suffers a larger drop off axis at higher frequencies.

I use the two 1" horns made by Faital on most of my projects at the moment. The one I would recommend for the 4544 is the LTH102 which is an awful lot of well made horn for the money. If this has an acceptable dispersion then I doubt that better can be obtained at this price.

These have a Tractrix profile. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_loudspeaker#Tractrix

The majority of the horns/waveguides on the market are either constant directivity or very similar. As Tony says, their response drops off at 6dB/oct. The good news is that all processors have a 6dB/oct high shelf available (even the old Super-X pro had a button for it!) to correct for this. When you're working with large format compression drivers this becomes even more important to take account of. I normally find a 6dB/oct high shelf, set to about 6kHz and gain of 6-9dB flattens most large CD flares out. For a 1" you can probably move the frequency up to more like 8-10kHz and use less gain.

It is also possible on a passive crossover to bypass the L-Pad with a small capacitor to achieve the same result.

Ultimately the only way you'll settle this is to get both CD's in front of you, stick them on the same flare and test with RTA/ears.

chaudio wrote:


Might have to do that.