Horn type

Front-loaded horn

How it connects

The front of the cone feeds the throat, usually through a small throat chamber. The throat chamber and the throat act as an acoustic low-pass filter, so they set how the top of the band rolls off.

The back of the cone faces the rear chamber. Like a sealed box, the rear chamber adds stiffness, which shapes how the driver is loaded at the bottom of the band.

Choose Port for the rear chamber and it becomes a vented chamber: the port radiates beside the mouth and adds output around its tuning.

When to use it

Good for

• Midbass and upper-bass horns where efficiency and output matter more than size.
• Comparing a horn against a vented or sealed box for the same driver in one workspace.

Watch for

• The horn only loads the driver where the mouth is big enough and the path is long enough. Below that band, output falls quickly.
• A small rear chamber lifts the upper bass but costs the lowest octave. Check the SPL and excursion graphs together when you change it.
• With a ported rear chamber, check the Port Velocity graph and the port resonance readouts, as you would for a vented box.

What you set

Set the enclosure type to Horn, then choose Front-loaded under Horn type, in the enclosure panel or in the Horn Editor’s path bar. These controls then appear in the horn card:

The driver marker is fixed at the throat. Drag the arrows and the dividers between spans to reshape the path, or click a value to type it. How the Horn Editor works.

What the rear chamber volume does

Only the rear chamber changes between the lines. The smallest chamber gives the steepest low-frequency roll-off and a flatter upper bass; the largest keeps the most output below about 60 Hz. Above about 200 Hz the three lines are nearly the same, because the rear chamber hardly matters there.

Diagnostics and stuffing

Locations run along the Main path, named by span and end, such as Main H1 throat. Horn Radiating Outputs shows the Main mouth, plus the Rear port when the rear chamber is ported. Reading the horn diagnostics.

Any span of the main horn can be stuffed. How stuffing works.

Folding and Hornresp

Folding

Available. The Fold tile opens the throat into the dead space behind the throat cap. Its Chamber chip compares the throat and rear chambers the fold leaves with your targets, and a rear port’s tube volume comes out of the rear chamber.

Hornresp export · Nd

Up to four spans export as a native record. A ported rear chamber is written as Hornresp’s Rear Vented chamber, a mapping that has not yet been checked against a native Hornresp capture. With no rear chamber, the export warns that Hornresp adds an exposed rear radiator.

Checked against Hornresp

26 native Hornresp cases of this type are re-simulated in the regression tests. 20 of 20 agreement checks meet their tolerances, and 6 more track stuffing-model differences without claiming agreement.

Folding a horn into a cabinet · Exporting to Hornresp

Try it

There is no example for this type yet. Open the simulator, add an enclosure, set its type to Horn and choose Front-loaded under Horn type. It starts from the default horn path.

Open the simulator