Most of the people that use horn's aren't tuned properly at all and it's hard to find an installer that will make them sound decent. Here's a little quote I found on ECA about horns. Tell me if you agree or disagree, RC supposly won many competitions and is using horns himself.

Here's a quote from RC

"any high frequency horn i've ever seen or heard has lots more distortion (i'll lump all distortion products into one sum no matter what the source) than most any good cone/dome HF speaker at normal listening levels in a car-------horns have much rougher response, higher throat pressures that always produce distortion, resonant colorations, and several other things that good conventional speakers don't have--------THEIR ONLY ADVANTAGE IN A CAR IS THE FACT THAT THEY ALLOW A REASONABLE ABILITY TO CONTROL THE DISPERSION PATTERN----------and SOMETIMES that is a reasonable tradeoff for their inherent bad characteristics"

2003 G35 Coupe 6mt Diamond Graphite
AIM= bkchang79
http://www.sounddomain.com/id/bkchang79

 

I don't disagree with that statement at all. I did some poking around on the sounddomain forums before installing them. The thing that I was most concerned about was tuning them properly, most competition horn-based systems have dual 1/3 octave 30-band EQ's for each channel, left and right. This is to take care of some of the peakiness and unusual spikes in frequency response from the horns. The amount of tuning for each side varied greatly from car to car, with fine tuning needed from almost all 30 bands from each EQ, to only 3-4 bands, depending on the install. In one of the discussions, a long time sound off veteran mentioned that if the horns were installed properly, and properly crossed over with no equalization, they could tonally sound and stage as well as most competition vehicles with dual 30 band EQ's. That was the selling point for me, but that's also why I went with the 4.1 in the dash, to help with some of the peakiness with the horns.

But I believe that the separate tuning for each channel is used because the differences in dash forms from one side of the car to the next. A horn mounted under the dash actually uses the opening of the dash as an extension of it's horn. But since the driver's side has the steering wheel in place and the dash is different in shape, it will have a different response from each side of the car.

Some of the characteristics of the horns that you are talking about, I can hear a little of, a small amount of coloration, but the rough response is not present. The system stages pretty well, but I still have a lot of aiming to do to improve it. It seems as though the soundstage is not sitting on my dash as others have experienced, but rather a little below it and closer to the listener. My left horn is a little closer to the listener than the right causing the soundstage to appear right biased in some music, I will also try to move it back about .5" and aim the driver a little higher to raise the soundstage.

If all else fails I could always invest in a pair of AudioControl EQT's. But for now I will play with the 4.1, crossover points, and aiming of the horns to perfect the sound. Overall, I like the way they sound and prefer this route because it is uncoventional