Pardon my late reply, and thanks for your remarks! What are the particulars of your horn/direct radiator/horn setup, and are you running it actively or passively?
Prior to my current main speakers I used passively configured all-horns, Simon Mears Audio Uccello's, which are an homage really to Paul Klipsch's Belle model. They were lovely speakers in places, but the bass horn was too small and had some upper bass peaks (~125Hz region), which marred the overall presentation with a chesty coloration. However it was still a bass horn, and the bass and lower mids quality and that special, organic "twang"-feeling - apart from the peak resonans in the upper bass - was great. Lovely mids too.
It goes to show though a front loaded bass horn must be non-truncated and load properly in its entire frequency range to uphold both sensitivity and smoothes of response, and that takes more size. Same goes with a midrange horn, ultimately. Large direct radiators instead, as you've found out yourself, are a nice compromise. High sensitivity dual 15" pro mid-woofers per channel, not least high-passed >80Hz, can be seriously imposing in a domestic environment when fired up, but what surprises me is how well-behaved they are up to the ~600Hz range where they're low-passed in my setup to the horns above. More important they, like a mid bass horn, energize the power region in a way that smaller, low eff. woofers simply cannot equal. It just sounds more real.
Ultimately I'd go with a properly sized, non-truncated midbass horn for the simply reason that I find they sound even better in this region, compared to anything really. The smoothness, clarity, vibrancy, dynamics and natural warmth that can be achieved here is downright outstanding. Someday I'll go there again - properly, without size restrictions.
Ultimately I'd go with a properly sized, non-truncated midbass horn for the simply reason that I find they sound even better in this region, compared to anything really. The smoothness, clarity, vibrancy, dynamics and natural warmth that can be achieved here is downright outstanding. Someday I'll go there again - properly, without size restrictions.
I've chosen tapped horns for subs duties being that a non-truncated FLH down to 20-25Hz would be about twice the size of the TH's I have now - simply impractical. Less extension with a non-truncated FLH would do - say, with a tune in the 30-35Hz region. Most importantly, I find, is choosing high eff. sub solutions (>95dB's) to attain the most natural and effortless reproduction, and there's a variety of ways to achieve this. TH's have excursion minima at the tune, and that offers some advantages in the lower octaves in particular, while having, fundamentally, the characteristics of a FLH.