- Many complaints about horn speakers concern their "honky" sound. This is often caused by resonances in the horn. Controlling the resonant peaks in high- and mid-frequency drivers is a crucial component of designing proper-sounding horn loudspeakers. Designers have addressed this in many ways, including damping and tension bracing.
- Proper horn speakers need specialized drivers. Using standard speaker drivers with a horn will produce poor sound with restricted frequency response. The drivers needed for a horn speaker should be smaller than the drivers for standard speakers. Popular drivers for horns are made by Fostex and JBL.
- A great advantage of horn speakers is their efficiency, which is usually over 100 dB at one watt of power. Horn speakers are designed to work best with LOWER powered amps. Paul W. Klipsch, an American inventor who founded the popular Klipsch speaker line, chose horns for his speaker technology because he wanted to be able to reproduce orchestral music at concert level volumes in his home.
- Another advantage of horn drivers is that they can be designed to produce the full frequency range from a single driver, negating the need for an audio crossover and simplifying the speaker design, as well as potentially eliminating the need for subwoofers to properly produce bass response.
- Drivers for horns can also be engineered to be "constant directivity," meaning they distribute sound in constant direction both horizontally and vertically over a very wide frequency range. This allows the listener to get similar sound in different positions.
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