So, this horn has serious history… a famous inventor, and famously disruptive purpose, how did I miss this?
The H1000 had a tragically short lived production from 1947 until maybe as late as 1952.ish… around 5 years. Costly to hand build, it was sold only with a D175 Driver attached as a package. It saw use in three systems, now extremely rare and historical… the D1000, used in Movie Theaters of the 1940s, The D1002 (single 15″) , a home HiFi speaker system and Studio Monitor., and the D1003 a twin 15″ Home HiFi speaker system. When these horns show up in the wild, it’s often a lost home installation of the early 1950s. We had a few originals for years, before discovering the true history behind them.
Shouldn’t I buy a bigger horn for pairing my 15″ woofer?
The H1000 is a smooth as silk powerhouse.. in fact, depending on your compression driver, it needs restraint (12db crossover recommended with single 15″), and likely bit of attenuation (feel free to use an L-Pad or Resistor) . It can keep up with 2x highly efficient 15″ woofers, as it did in the D1003 Bass Reflex setup.
OK…..
So, can I use 12″ woofers?
Sure! Actually you can use it variety of methods to fill in your low frequencies. (even very extraordinary subwoofer applications such as was implemented in numerous 1970s designs..) Let creativity can reign wild with such a compact and smooth horn as this. Keeping in mind, 12 inch direct radiator woofers are easily overpowered by a single H 1000 – – So you will want to run them in tandem if possible — in which case they will do quite well. Many famous vintage horn speaker systems that sound great utilize twin 12 inch woofers; it’s a very cool setup!
But, wait a second….
Shouldn’t I just use a larger 800hz or even a 500hz horn?
You could… but it would not be guaranteed to sound or satisfy to any further extent. Cutoff points are only one design feature. And, understandably, many engineer’s, designers and hobbyists fixate on this very real consideration… the H1000 outsmarts and outperforms many (but not all!) much larger, uglier, costlier horns of many designs. It accomplishes this with features exclusively related to it’s small size.
Sounds too good to be true …explain further, please!….
Why would such a small horn, be a better choice, than say, an Altec 500 or 800hz design?
Good question! There are many factors as play here… Let’s start with crossover points…
1.) Using a passive crossover, (which you should do because they still sound the best) there’s always a dead band that you need to fight that’s the crossover point and it’s best to cross over at a higher region then the specific low end performance of any given horn to avoid canceling out frequencies produced more competently possibly buy your other components. This begins to negate some of the advantages of a larger horn but it doesn’t stop there..
2.) To acheve lower crossover points, corn designers got pretty wild after World War II. Horns left the very troublesome curly and then shapes of the 1920s and 30s and transitioned into more refined “bent horn designs often incorporating radio flares. But the 1960s and 70s most horns were what was called biradial. These horns achieved impressively long wavelenghts, impressively comact dimentions… Just keep in mind it is a very diminishing return in many aspects. The bends that were incorporated in some of the designs, for instance the Western Electric KS models – – varied in effectiveness often sounding very good but with varying states of coloration. The Western Electric 32 is a very popular horn in many great sounding systems… Yeah if you listen to it in the role you’ll hear it has major issues with voicing.