Quality of sound from a wooden vs metal and straight vs cygn

[De Soto Frank]

I only have C and H Edison reproducers, but have several straight horns: 10" "Gem", 14" black & brass Witches' Hat, 30" all-brass Standard Metal horn, 30" Hawthorne & Scheble "Silk-Finish" horn (brass bell, steel cone with silk jacket over it), and an all "tin" Tea-Tray Company 11-panel 30" "morning glory".

The Tea-Tray morning glory have been my "favorite", mostly due to its red lacquer and pansy decoration.

One evening, I had a friend over and was demonstrating my cylinder machines, with the Tea-Tray horn... while playing a fairly loud cylinder (brass band), I became aware of a strange tone that would come and go, accompanying certain pitches in the music... at one point when I heard the strange noise, I quickly lifted the reproducer from the record, and the music stopped... but the strange noise continued for another second or so. I repeated the phenomenon several times...

My friend heard it too.

It turns out that we were hearing the metal horn resonating with specific pitches in the music, causing the horn itself to produce a metallic "ring" of its own. Placing a hand on the side of the horn, or laying a small towel over the top of the horn would muffle or eliminate the ringing.

We proceeded to try the other 30" horns, the all-brass "Standard", and the H&S "Silk-Finish".

The brass horn had little to no resonance, and the Silk-Finish seemed to have none at all.


My take-away from this very basic experiment, was that the Tea-Tray panelled horn was the most resonant(producing unwanted sounds of its own), most likely due to the thin metal used in its construction.

The all-brass horn uses thicker metal, and the Silk-Finish horn has the tight silk jacket over the cone, muffling vibrations.

The Cygnet horns are probably less prone to "blasting", and the wooden horns will have a more mellow tone, although if there are cracks in the wood, they might buzz ?


All that said, the heavier the horn material, the less likely for the horn to start "ringing" from sympathetic resonance.

My own opinion is that at least with 30" horns, the painted morning glories might look snazzy, but they may not produce the best sound.

[startgroove]

This has me curious:
Is there truly a difference between a wood horn and a metal horn sound reproduction? To test that, I chose a spear point Victor wood horn and a paneled Victor metal horn to compare, both the same over all length and using the same phonograph and record.
I think my ears detected a slight difference in the quality between the two. The wood horn seemed to have clearer mid to high tones and less resonance to the sound. I didn't think the low notes were much different between the two.
At the same time, I wanted to know what the sound was doing to the horn. I decided to test the vibrations of the horn material and compare the two horns again. By placing my fingers on the surface of the horns, at various places along the sound path, I could feel the horn material vibrating in sympathy to the sound, but not to all of it. With the wood horn, it seemed that I could not feel the lower tones as well as the mid range tones, and those were rather mild vibrations. The metal horn seemed to vibrate a slightly more than the wood horn when testing the lower tones. However, the mid's and higher tones caused a much stronger vibration of the metal compared to the wood. Both horns seemed to vibrate the most at the throat of the horn, and less at the outer edge of the horn, with the wood horn vibrating less at the outer edge than the metal horn.
I concluded that wood resonates less in sympathy with the sound than a metal horn does. Or to put it another way, the wood horn does not sound as "tinny" to me as a metal horn.