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 PD 184 driver instead of the PD 1850 driver in short folded horns



Drivers like the PD 184 will work in a short folded horn because the cab is not really a horn. For the driver to be properly loaded by a horn means a horn length of over 5.5 feet, something none of the Turbo or Funktion bins have. When the horn is less than 5.5 feet long we have what I call a horn assisted design. Basically the horn just adds a bit of gain from around 80 to 150 Hz, the cab will produce notes above and below these frequencies, just at a lower volume. You want a driver with a low resonance a powerful motor system and good damping, the PD 184 has all of these. Most of my short horn designs will work down to 50 Hz because I design them to be sealed boxes first that just have a bit of extra gain and kick from the horn in the 80 to 150 Hz range. Below the horn cutoff most of these short horns will still produce a useful output down to the cutoff point of the sealed box. It's a hard thing to design, do you go for a driver with high EBP that you know will work well in a horn and have the output from 80 to 150 Hz controlled and fast, or do you use a driver with a lower EBP and make use of the lower sealed box cutoff point. Drivers like the PD 184 are ideal because they sit somewhere in between the two. They are reasonably controlled and fairly fast and also have good extension. The 1850 has a higher resonance and more powerful motor system, so has a much higher EBP. This will always make the 80 to 150 Hz range more prominent when it is used in a short horn, hence the sound will have more grunt. If you change your 1850 drivers for 184 drivers you will get that smooth Hi Fi sound and a lower cutoff point, but you will lose quite a lot of efficiency, will gain more power compression and not have such a high power thermal limit. So all in all you might lose up to 3 dB per cab of SPL. Whether or not you can live with that only you know, but I guess not seeing as you said you already don't have enough power to drive the cabs with and would like an even higher SPL from them. If you have lots of these short horns, like over 8 per stack then the effective horn length will appear to be longer, so the use of a driver like the 1850 will pay of because the stack will work as a true horn and so need drivers with a high EBP. You will find that that most of the grunt to the sound will disappear if you can use big enough stacks. If you used the 184 driver in very large stacks then the sound may become very slow and heavy. So, it might pay to keep the 1850 drivers but just use more cabs per stack to achieve a bigger and longer horn, because if you go with the 184 option then you will have to use a lot more cabs anyway to get the desired SPL, so you might as well use the 1850 if you have a bigger stack and have a lot higher SPL.


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