1" compression drivers

can anyone direct me to any decent 1" cd drivers and a good matching horn. Loud enough to keep up to a horn loaded b&c 8pe21 Hopefully no more expensive than about £150

thanks

This question gets asked pretty much every other day! I use a DE250 above a horn loaded 8PE21 in my hi-mids, crossed over at 2.1kHz and at sounds sweet as a nut. I'm using some horns which I bought off Tony.A.S.S. a while back - superb sound and nice even coverage.

so the de250 is a good match for the 8pe21? hmmm, thats exactly what Im planning on doing possibly.how much better is the de500?
cheers
Markk.

The DE500 has a titanium diaphragm and neo magnet, whereas the DE250 is a polyimide diaphragm. I would imagine they sound quite a bit different, mainly due to the diaphragm material.

I can't see any point in choosing the 500 over the 250, since it's 1.5dB less sensitive and the power handling is only 50W RMS instead of 60W RMS. Oh, and it's probably more expensive too!

I'm using a horn made from a mould I bought off Tony, which was fitted to his R2U cabs. No phase plug, but there's a phasing ring (his term) on the backplate of the horn, which sits in around the edge of the cone. I haven't had a chance to do any final measurements, but initial plots showed a sharp null at 2.2kHz, hence my choice of 2.1kHz crossover point.

Tek, There used to be a saying when Hi-Fi was in its infancy the " the more you open the window the more sh*t flies in" in other words as a system gets better the easier it is for us to hear distortion, noise etc. that cannot be heard on an inferior system.
It is very difficult to beat the sound quality of the DE250's without spending a shed load of money. What was the rest of the system, sound source etc?

Tony


Edited by Tony Wilkes - 03 July 2008 at 12:29pm

Tek: depends on the source material, crossover, horn and other things, but I can't believe any piezo will sound better than a DE250 (or most other compression drivers for that matter). I agree with Tony's point about being able to hear more of everything (including the bad stuff) when you have a decent system. You may find there was a large range of frequencies missing when you were just using piezos.

I've used DE250s in EV SX300 cabs (fantastic horns in those, but non-removable!) and on some of Tony.A.S.S.'s 75x40 glass fibre horns, but these are quite deep - 23cm or so - unlike many of the 1" horns currently on the market, which don't load the driver properly at lower frequencies. I think Beyma do a reasonable 60x40 horn which is deeper than some of B&C's current offerings.