Peavey SP1 Horn

[rmlowz]

Hello, I have a pair of these horns that go on top of a SP1. Do you know of a driver that would go with these that would be sound better for critical home listening?

Thanks

Rich

[Dookie]

The SP1 horn, I'm guessing you have the MFX-1?, requires CD horn eq in order to sound its best. Do you have that available in your home system? Without CD horn eq they will sound bad regardless of the driver. I had a set of Sp1's on my home system for a while and thought they sounded rather good for their bandwidth.

https://peavey.com/c/Horn-Equalization

Doug

[dak]

Hello, I have a pair of these horns that go on top of a SP1. Do you know of a driver that would go with these that would be sound better for critical home listening?

"Better"? You want driver and crossover to be matched. Peavey was pretty good doing crossovers for the drivers/horns they used in SP1 times, so you are not likely to improve much for "critical home listening" unless you are angling for something with pretty similar frequency response.

That being said, I recently got myself a D290Py-S driver from PRV Audio (109dB response, 650-19000Hz 90W continuous screw-on, polyimide membrane) and found it pretty nice. But I had to significantly mess with the crossover I used (system, bass speaker and horn were not from Peavey but I did break a Peavey SP2 crossover down for parts and reworked it to match the rest of the setup).

Peavey's horn crossovers tend to use custom autotransformers (among other parts), so they fit pretty well with a particular woofer/horn/driver combination. Also drivers nowadays tend to be built better matching modern horns and thus need less specialised horn EQ.

In short, you are not likely to improve matters a lot for "critical listening" by exchanging parts for different ones without investing a lot of time into measuring things out and adapting them.

[rmlowz]

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate it. I have an Equalizer. I also have a ALK CSW-450 universal crossovers. I plan on making a three way. This is all a big experiment trying to repurpose these horns.

Thanks
Rich

[dak]

Well, ok. If I remember right, the SP1 horns are fairly large so they should also cover lower frequencies. Titanium membranes tended to have a comparatively high crossover frequency for my taste (frequency range from 800Hz in specs is typical, so you don't want to have lower crossover frequency than something like 1200Hz with 18dB/octave highpass), phenolic membranes don't cover the high frequencies (go to something like 12kHz). Titanium also does not seem to behave all that benignly with unexpected horn types (acoustic impedance mismatch). I was just interested in covering a 100W amp and the typical screw-on throat: the higher powered drivers were off my price chart. So in that kind of space, I found the said driver a nice deal, and shipping is likely cheaper to you (presumably U.S.) than to me (Europe) from Brazil.