Big Horn Reviews
Transcription
Big Horn Reviews
WHAT HI-FI TEMPTATION MARCH 1999 Carfrae BigHorn Loudspeaker We’ve reviewed some big speakers in our time, but these behemoth boxes stand a staggering 2.2m tall. They’re the brainchild of Jim Carfrae, whose fascination with horn speakers led him to create a speaker radically different from anything he’d seen, or heard, before. The body of the horn is made from curved sections of 18mm birch ply, which can be finished with a choice of real wood veneers. Everything else is made of solid maple, a wood chosen for its tonal qualities as well as its looks. The extraordinary look of the CarfraeHorns is dictated by the use of a ‘tractrix contour’ - a shape derived from mathematics to give the soundwaves a clear path through the hom. The drive units are Lowther DX4s (costing £6OO each), mounted directly to a 40mm-thick tube of solid hardwood, while sensitivity is a high 108dB/W/m. Hooked up to a Vardis S15 amplifier fed by a Michell Orbe tumtahle and DPA Renaissance Pulse Array CD player, the detail these speakers produce is breathtakin. Listen to a selection of Keb Mo tracks and every pluck of guitar string or snap of a drum is conveyed with lifelike accuracy. Voices are handled particularly well, kd lang’s solo vocal on Don‘t Smoke in Bed from her Drag album sounding pin-sharp and having tremendous presence in the centre of what is a wonderfully evocative soundstage. The CarfraeHorns won’t suit all, and they need a very large room to accommodate them. But for sheer delicacy, scale and intimacy they’re a rare treat indeed. S W E VI RE Carfrae Loudspeakers Ashleigh, Kingsbridge Hill, Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5SZ United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] ( 01803 868461 Web: www.carfrae.com Fax 01803 868461 Anyone who visited the Excelsior Hotel exhibits at The Hi-Fi Show last September will remember seeing a large, rather alienlooking speaker, presiding over the entrance adjacent to the TAG McLaren stand. This £18,000 construction is the work of one Jim Carfrae, designer and builder of horn speakers, and more specifically those based on the Tractrix flare contour. On a recent visit to the home of Carfrae, I had an opportunity to see and hear these remarkable horns in action. Based in rural Devon, a few miles outside Totnes and within trekking distance of Dartmoor, a pair of these magnificent horns were set up in an airy listening room in the converted farmhouse from where Carfrae works. Jim has devoted much time and research into developing these speakers into a commercial product The main carcass of the loudspeaker is made by a John Makepeace trained cabinetmaker from continuous sections of 18mm birch laminate ply, veneered to customer specifications. By hand-building this cabinet using a vacuum forming process, the unique curve comes into shape which avoids both straight lines and parallel surfaces, and ensures no one section is straight. This helps prevent the formation of standing waves.. The Carfrae Horn was designed with the help of Jim’s brother, an engineer who wrote a software program to calculate the course of the horn What differentiates this horn’s profile from most designs is the adherence to the ideal without any nasty sharp bends, unavoidable when folding the horn into a more compact box. This horn deviates, it is claimed, by no more than a millimetre along its tract. The current incarnation is designed for the Lowther DX4 driver, a twin-coned driver with lightweight paper diaphragm and Neodymium magnet. This is held rigidly in a 40mm thick wooden cylinder, hewn from maple, with the rearward radiation directed through the 3.34m Tractrix chamber. But before the start of the horn proper, the driver chamber acts as a low-pass filter, screening frequencies above the upper cutoff of 200Hz- chosen as its wavelength is an odd multiple of the horn length, avoiding cancellation effects Listening soon showed that the sounds the system could make were an exercise in naturalness, a step closer to the original sound, as one well-quoted pundit would say. In the sweet spot, some ten feet or so from the horns (themselves backed into corners to augment bass delivery), there was a tangible presence in the room, excellent if not totally 3D imagery, and a stunning sense of detail. The vinyl front-end comprehensively bettered the CD rival-not through any particular fault in the digital equipment, which I have heard giving believable results before- but maybe because of the purist ethos in the analogue front end. With CDs, the horns proved they could play at high volumes with little sense of constriction or ‘cuppy’ coloration, handling dynamics as only a good horn can. Low-level detail was astonishing, giving a great sense of atmosphere, especially with live acoustic music. A jazz quartet piece featuring two double basses showed not only the subtly different timbres of the instruments but also the techniques of the respective players-all with palpable imaging. And talking of bass, this was not that shy, despite the design’s inherent sudden rolloff below a specific frequency. The quoted literature notes a response of 32Hz-22kHz (no dB roll-offs given), and the speaker was heard to go deep despite the DX4 not being optimised for the horn at the time of my visit. This has, I am informed, now been corrected for the better. From the initial concept, it has taken two years to arrive at the horn made today. Now, the virtually no-compromise design of the original horn is about to be joined by a smaller and cheaper version, known affectionately as the ‘Little Big Horn’ and scheduled to debut at the Frankfurt High-End Show. Jim hopes to sell this half-scale version (which may yet feature an auxiliary bass driver to supplement the lower frequencies) for under £5000. Until then there is this amazing transducer to dream over, or to save the pennies for.
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