DirtDawg, those are beautiful speakers. Do they sound as nice as they look?
I have only heard the Martinelli speakers at an audio show, but I have heard the drivers he uses in other cabinets and they are very nice, high fidelity, etc. Of course, he custom fits and tweaks his drivers, but that's OK, because I do, too. I chose a higher quality set of drivers to build around, so my results should excede his published specifications, especially in flatness of frequency response, transient response and efficiency, areas that us tube amp users strive towards. But, he does not take a year and a half to build and weeks to tune one set, either. Also, much of the appreciation of good speakers is in the area of personal taste and synergy so saying mine will be better is not really fair to a commercially successful product. I'm sure his personal set is tweaked the way he likes them.
I hope I didn't mislead, but the pic I posted is not my work, but the inspiration which has turned into my latest project. Many years ago I built large hi-frequency horns out of wood, just like it was done in the thirties and forties for cinema theaters. Very costly and time consuming, but nothing sounds as good as solid wood for high frequency propagation. I have always wanted to build a smaller set for home use. Unfortunately, most horns available nowdays are either some alloy of aluminum or poly-this-or-that and they have totally lost their soul and warmth. Mine are wood, similar to Martinelli, but I used poplar and oak, instead of pretty exotic woods, I could never afford.
After finding Mr. Matinelli's site, emailing him a few times with questions and finally learning to control my drool again, I began to build a set of wood horns of my own design (his are tractrix curve, mine are exponential, which is preferred for near field listening). I started last winter (I don't have fancy machine tools, only hand tools), took the fall off (starting the kids in school was a major upset, once again) and now I can see the final bits of work almost done on the large pair of horns that take over from the woofer. I already have my woofer cabinets, built, tuned, damped, and oil finished and I've been listening to them since mid summer, with an evil poly horn on top.
The woofers are magnificent sounding and once I have the final finish on the wood horns, get them aligned and properly tuned, I will have a full range speaker system of the highest quality. I have used all vintage JBL components, brought up to modern specifications, each one tweaked and perfected for flat response in open air (yes, one of my obsessions). In the coming year I will also finish construction of a much smaller wood horn, which will sit atop the (larger than Martinelli's) mid horn and subdivide the upper frequency range for increased dispersion of the upper octave.
I'm so glad to be past the noisy power tool stage and almost done. Now I can sand and fit until I get tired and sit down and postwhore typos, then go sand some more ..... the end is near. I will post pics of mine when they are done.
