Visit to Non-Smoking Man to hear his 5-way horn system
Jack 'Non-Smoking Man' is only up the road from me in Bracknell and he's been to mine on a number of occasions, but while I've picked stuff up/dropped stuff off at his, I've never managed to hear his system - till last night.
It's a five-way horn setup which made up part of the famous collaborative system at Scalford a couple of years back. He has it powered by an eclectic mix of amps, most crucially with an EL34 single ended and KT88 PP amp on two of the mid-range drivers, and a really interesting electronic (i.e., not digital) crossover.
I'm not one to get into the technicalities of horns but there's a rightness about Jack's setup which quite a few horn systems I've heard don't have. While some prioritise detail, or top to bottom frequency response, or holographic imaging, Jack has somehow majored on something that's often forgotten - musicality. While it's not short on all those hifi virtues, what it has in spades is a naturalness, an easy listening quality that's quite remarkable.
I found this especially when we played some harpsichord music (the Nonesuch recording or Bach's 14 canons, one of my all-time favourties). Harpsichord can be hard to reproduce and its characteristics can grate if done badly, but if you've had a harpsichord in your living room (as I've had) or been to lots of early music concerts (er… as I have) you also know that beyond that (literally) plucky, abrasive quality which can be annoying in the wrong setup, there's a harmonic richness, a 'harmony', that is devilishly difficult to reproduce. Well, Jack's setup manages it wonderfully.
It helps that it's fed properly - Jack's Cranfield Rock, with Alphason HR100S and Cadenza Blue, sounded pretty much exactly like my old Rock Reference. What a cracking turntable. No digital nasties here.
We played quite a bit of my stuff including some late Brubeck (some fab fretless bass work by Dave Brubeck's son, Chris) and some Dowland lute songs with the sparkling Emma Kirkby (a flame-haired Beatrice to me in my adolescence, which makes me feel a little old now as she's just turned 66!).
Jack also shared some of his musical passion for Blues .. a new avenue for me but I came away with a couple to look out for and plans to go back to investigate more of his collection.
And this is the secret, I suspect. When I'm working on my system I don't endeavour to make good hifi, I'm trying to find something capable of playing cantatas, Lieder and chamber music with full expression and emotion (a tactic which co-incidentally usually leads to a good job with other genres as well …). Blues on Jack's setup (for example, one delta blues record, astonishingly, recorded with just one mic) sounds like you are at a room-sized gig. Glorious.
Anyway what we have here is a horn system that doesn't sound like a 'horn system'. Rather, it sounds like music. Which is kind of the point.
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Originally Posted by montesquieu
