Words by Rafe Arnott, all photography courtesy Fern & Roby.
There’s something nostalgic and mysterious about horn loudspeakers. Despite, historically, their industrial build quality, brutalist design aesthetic and domestically imposing dimensions, they nonetheless evoke a sense of wonder and awe with their sonic capabilities for those fortunate enough to hear a properly set up pair. Oft times erroneously dismissed by audiophile-types as having no bass or dynamic capability, and shrill ‘honking’ upper-frequency response, these hulking Goliath have a fiercely loyal following amongst the fractured tribes of hi-fi.
As someone who first explored dual-concentric, or duplex-style drivers as they can be called – and a somewhat natural progression (nee curiosity) to horns from there – only in the last two years, I’m a newcomer to the genre and have much to learn. But, what I do know, is that a properly implemented horn system fed from appropriate amplification is capable of reproducing some of the most lifelike, impactful and musical playback of the recorded event I’ve ever experienced. And since I now have horns in my living room, much of the conversation when friends are over centers around said horns. It was during one of these sessions that I recalled Christopher Hildebrand, the owner and chief designer of Fern & Roby, had produced a one-off pair of beautiful LeCleach’h-styled horns several years back.
The next day I dug up some old PDFs from an issue of The Occasional magazine I started while working at Part-time Audiophile. There, nestled between the digital pages, was the brief article I’d asked Hildebrand to write about his horn design at the time. Looking at the images I was struck at how elegant his implementation had been, and how, in some ways, while it was a design which evoked the past, it was ahead of its time. I subsequently reached out to Hildebrand in Richmond, Virginia and asked if we could sit down with a beer over Zoom and discuss the evolution of the Fern & Roby horn, and whether he had any plans to revisit the design.
“It was intimidating at first because it was big and complex, and I was looking for it be truly full range. My understanding of what great full-range audio was at that point was different. It took me a few years to cultivate that.”
–Christopher Hildebrand
Resistor Mag: Would you say the horn design speaker you produced was more an artistic statement product when you designed it, rather than something you expected to sell?
Christopher Hildebrand: “You kind of have to acknowledge it’s not going to go into as many homes. It’s really more a sculpture or piece of art than a product per se. With Fern & Roby being a spinoff of Tektonics (Hildebrand’s industrial design and manufacturing company), I have this dialog of intention to want to make products which go into as many homes as possible and wanting to explore my creativity as an artist – so it’s industrial designer vs. artist.
“Fern & Roby had a selfish beginning. I needed to explore my more creative and artistic side, because I’d been serving a role as a contributor to other designers work for so long – which is a really rich and powerful collaborative experience – but it’s really about supporting someone else’s creative vision, not your own. That was what I was doing professionally, that’s what paid the bills. So, a lot of that is about setting aside your own excitement and embracing someone else’s excitement about their idea and helping them elevate the work.
“So, when I started F&R there was a piece of me which became unchained and I wanted to do my own thing, and that’s where the Beam speaker came from: My own exploration of wood and form and what tools I could use, and the process. The Tredegar turntable is cast metal and has a very sculptural quality to it and once I did those I started to turn to designs which were more product-oriented and appeal to a larger market. It was a bit more then about being restrained, or refined, in my work – which was great, it really tightened up what I was doing and I learned enough, and was surrounded by great collaborators that I had the support to tackle the Horn system back in 2017.
“It was intimidating at first because it was big and complex, and I was looking for it be truly full range. My understanding of what great full-range audio was at that point was different. It took me a few years to cultivate that.”
Photo right: The Fern & Roby Horn prototype. Photo below: The Horn at the Tektonics/F&R factory in Richmond, Virginia.
Resistor Mag: There are many horn speaker designs. What inspired the look of the F&R Horn?
Christopher Hildebrand: “There’s a historic dialogue in my work with what has been done before, what I have been exposed to, what other people are doing. I learned about Western Electric horns and Altec horns, and then I was exposed to the LeCleach'h horn, first in a client’s home in Denver, and next through Gary Gill, the owner of Capital Audio Fest. I hadn’t seen them before, they were very interesting to me, they weren’t compression driver and multi-cell horns – which to me would be hard to duplicate. I would have to basically be in that world of finding vintage drivers and reconditioning them. [Fern & Roby] could develop the castings for multi-cell horns, but there are a lot of those out there.
“Gary had a smaller set of LeCleach'h horns and said I could play around with them. I looked at what was in front of me and the resources, and that was the beginning of it – that was the starting point. So I looked at [those horn lenses] and thought “How do I support it? How do I make it adjustable? How do I have this outlandish shape fit into someone’s home decor without it seeming larger than life and outrageous?” As a designer making furnishings, I want my products to compliment many environments and I found myself working on these almost Dr. Seuss-type horns. The challenge for me was to make them more approachable, make the palette of materials warm and industrial – potentially – but not like you had some mechanism in your home, and I also didn’t want them to be garish like Dr. Seuss. I wasn’t looking to make something candy apple red, yellow and cerulean blue – the world of Dr. Seuss is outrageous – and that’s what these forms reminded me of, to me it was about overlaying a platte of colours and textures I found appealing and related to the other work I do.
“I jokingly refer to them as an un-product. It was an exhibit of sorts for me to explore and unpack and refine my understanding of speaker designs and systems of audio – because it’s a system made of multiple parts and allows you control over each band that you’re producing.”
Resistor Mag: You spoke of how the process allowed you to carefully consider what it is you wanted to deliver with the horns, the exposure of the design vs. a conventional box, can you elaborate?
Christopher Hildebrand: “… the nature of a crossover becomes really obvious when you have three separate speakers you have to control, but when it’s all in a box you have this condensed circuit, I don’t think that’s as approachable to the laymen to understand what a multiway speaker is. When you explain that to a non-audiophile you have to work through the eyes glazing over piece of it. But with a set of horns it’s all right there, you see those [horn, drive unit, bass enclosure] are separate and they have to be controlled and coordinated to deliver a seamless performance. I think developing a horn really shaped my understanding and cemented everything for me in allowing me a canvas to do something sculptural. It wasn’t a marketing piece for me, it was an experience I needed to have, and since I built them I’ve learned so much more… it’s been back there in my mind that I need to go back, to revisit this project and work on refining and improving it.”
Resistor Mag: You showed them once at Capital Audiofest in 2015, but they’ve been shelved ever since. What happened?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I had a lot of opportunities all converging at once in that moment and I decided to step back and focus on the turntables and the relationship I had with [Linear Tube Audio] and devoted a lot of time and energy to work with them on designing and building the chassis for all of their product. You can only do so much and each project consumes a huge amount of focus and energy… it allowed me to do something exciting, it exposed people to [Fern & Roby], and allowed us to introduce the relationship between me and LTA. I really got into tube amps working with them – most of their amps are lower-power – and the speakers I had developed were 89~90dB and I started thinking what could I do with a lower-power design that would be simpler and accessible to more people. That was the Genesis of the Raven design and that’s been going great, but on some levels the horns keep calling me.”
Photos above: Left – Rear view of the Horn. Right – A close up of the bronze bearing assembly in the horn support.
Resistor Mag: What do you like, specifically, about the LeCleach'h horns?
Christopher Hildebrand: “Using an eight-inch single driver in a waveguide you can get down to the 300~150Hz range, which is much harder to do with a compression driver setup… and that’s where coming back to the horns will centre. What do I want to put into that [horn], what do I want to do with the cabinet for the midrange and the sub? The way I designed that system was to be a nearly full-range, two-way design or add the sub. Just changing the midrange piece of it… not everyone has room for dipole subs next to the horn system so making a two-way horn is pretty appealing to me. When they’re setup they stand close to six feet tall. Making the stands was one of my favourite parts of developing that, playing around with 3/4-inch steel plate making a shape – the real struggle with the LeCleach'h horns is how do you integrate this huge horn without getting in the way of what’s below it? That’s what I love about design, there is the stuff you have to do and then there are the things you want to do visually and aesthetically, and functionally. The tension and dialog between those things is where the richness of a design-created problem is. I wanted the horns to be adjustable up and down, raise them up and point them down at you, lower them and point them straight at you, and needing to think about where do you get your midrange from? How do the drivers relate, and wanting them to be in phase so you need the midrange to be behind the horn and you don’t the horn blocking that part of your signal… the hardware for that pivot with the big bronze washer – that was part of the real joy. How do you keep it simple and functional so it could be used in different types of rooms and at the same time be stable, strong and flexible?
“I think the next version will be more refined. In terms of the horn I’ve toyed with the idea of spinning it out of brass… start with an 1/8th-inch four-by-four sheet. Basically you make a form of the inside of the shape, cut a disc and spin it on a lathe, pushing the sheet against the form… like throwing a pot from clay, but it’s metal. Metal has plasticity, it’s mouldable, it’s moveable, metal is ductile and it stays where you move it. I think doing a horn out of spun metal would be great, I’m not opposed to fibreglass like the originals though. Most of the stuff I’ve done at F&R is about natural materials. But the horns allowed me to play with colour – the dialog between the white and the red ring of the driver and the brass – that for me was another joy of it. The expansion of my understanding of full-range audio and the experience of it; the sound stage, the imaging, those concepts crystallized for me in that project and allowed me to explain them to my clients and have a clear vernacular for non-audiophiles about high-end audio… it was worth every effort, minute and dollar I spent to develop that horn system.”
Resistor Mag: So it helped inform all your decisions on speaker design moving forward?
Christopher Hildebrand: “Absolutely. It unpacked and deconstructed all of the things that goes into a single-box speaker and informed a lot of my product development ideas. Who am I designing a speaker for? What are my goals for each design? What kind of room would this go into? That’s all exciting stuff, and unless you build a system like that you don’t run into the question of how am I going to make a crate for this? How am I going to ship it and deliver it and set it all up? You don’t think about those things until you make one… it’s critical to succeeding as a business.”
Resistor Mag: Did other horn designs come into play during the creative process?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I love Western Electric-style horns, I’d love to get back to that – I have some compression drivers – so that’s in my view too. And the Altec-style horn systems are really appealing too… I think there’s a valid way to get there with all the different approaches. I think the LeCleach'h horns are appealing because you have a single driver giving you a bigger range that you can actually make a safer crossover point from, but a compression driver with a big horn is really interesting and exciting too. I’ve not locked myself down, but I’ve got so much figured out from the earlier system it would be easy to iterate from that. I really want to do the Western Electric style too, but I don’t want to compete with myself. I’ll have a make a choice at some point.”
Resistor Mag: What stands out from the experience of building the horn?
Christopher Hildebrand: “It was an exploration into expanding my audio knowledge and experience… I feel like every designer needs to do something like this to understand the nuance of the smaller projects. From an audio standpoint I thought it was really important to me as designer, from an artistic standpoint I feel that too. I took this big swing and made something that was outrageous, fun and lively and I didn’t care if it was going to fit into every home. It was something I feel like I had to make.
Photo left: F&R Horns with subwoofer units.
Resistor Mag: Has the horn’s time come (again) in mainstream high fidelity? Do you think the market is more receptive now then it was several years ago to this type of design?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I think so. Where I was when I was doing it, there were very few people that I spoke to with real interest in horns. People would say, “Well, you can’t get dynamic range or punch out of horns…” The hi-fi market has these camps, these tribes of people who subscribe to beliefs like “You can only get X from Y.” My explorations of the things I’ve done came from me being an outsider diving in and exploring things which were exciting to me and not caring about fitting into one group or another – I found it stifling, the idea that I had to fit into that. When I saw the types of horns I was playing with, they were mostly in the DIY crowd, but there were very few examples of them. Then I saw OMA (Oswald Mills Audio) and the Western Electric-style horns and all the Altec stuff embracing the vintage systems and they made me wonder “Am I making a product or reconstituting one?” So, I really do think my design was unique because it was taking something already out in the public domain. The challenge was how to evolve it into something distinctly Fern & Roby which can be reproduced and become a product?”
Resistor Mag: Do you think you achieved those goals?
Christopher Hildebrand: “There’s a lot I wouldn’t change. Mostly what I would do is focus on refinements. How to reproduce my own lenses, support of the drivers, support of the lens. How to design the packaging, how is this going together for the consumer – a complete system? Often with horns what you select to amplify each stage has a profound impact on how it sounds. If you’re doing a passive crossover and driving it with a tube or solid state amp, then you’re getting back to a simpler idea. What I was doing was making a tri-amplified system with active crossovers. That’s not something you sell as a pair of speakers, that’s something you sell as an entire proposition. Frankly, one of the reasons I didn’t dive into it more aggressively then was because I was a virtual nobody, I wasn’t known as a speaker designer. I was just some guy showing up and doing some outrageous stuff. So revisiting it now would be the place where I think a lot of my clients would be excited about it.”
Photo right: Horn suppport detail.
Photo above: The full F&R Horn system prototypes.
Resistor Mag: Are you planning on a passive crossover?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I think I’d want to do it either way. For clients who wanted a passive crossover, I know so much more now. I think I’d do a really good job of designing a two-way version and that would appeal to people with smaller rooms who wanted to have a single amplifier, or mono blocs powering them. And then there would be the bigger system with a sub where I’d want to go back to the active crossover and direct amplification approach. That’s a very expensive system, but there are those people who have that kind of appetite. Most people who are interested in horns really want to get into it themselves, and there’s a piece of that – when you’re making a product are you selling to DIY’ers? It’s an exciting dialog to be part of with those people, but they’re enthusiasts who want to embrace their own authorship too, and if you want to make a product you have to be able to deliver reliable, consistent results. So controlling what amplification you put with it, telling people what amplification to put with it, how am I going to be able to succeed in setting up a complete system for them? That’s all a big part of what I learned in the past six years since I did the horns.”
Resistor Mag: Speaking of DIY, someone who has had marked success bringing niche vintage-style drivers to market with his DIY kits (alongside his custom speaker builds) is Devon Turnbull.
Christopher Hildebrand: “[Turnbull] has been really interesting to me because I think he’s done one of the best jobs of repackaging the vintage Altec designs into something that’s recognizable to all the people who have been part of that, but also is his own take on it in a very tasteful way – it’s not departing too much from the history of that genre – but it’s also introducing it to a whole bunch of people who have never seen it. I think the way he presented himself as someone who is just an enthusiast is brilliant marketing… he’s definitely figured some stuff out, but he’s got some of the same challenges of people doing anything in the vintage speaker/horn world have, which is that at a certain point if you don’t own the IP and the manufacturing capability then you’re at a place where the stifling of the supply limits the growth the business can have. [For example] if you’re refurbishing old Altec or Western Electric components, you only have so many of those parts out there, or there’s only a couple of people who are able to make those pieces, that’s a big concern from a product development standpoint. I don’t want to get myself into a place where I invest a huge amount and I don’t have the ability to go full-throttle on making it. That’s the appeal of the LeCleach'h horn, I can control all of those pieces.”
Photos above: Left – Front view of midbass unit. Right – Detail of metalwork encasing the midbass unit.
Resistor Mag: The next iteration, would you consider larger drivers, a larger bass enclosure?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I used a six-inch driver in the horns, and I would probably use an eight-inch driver in the lens instead of a six. I think that would give me better results immediately. I’m going to try the driver I used with the Ravens (speakers) and see how that works. And then there’s the question of do I go with a 10, or 12 or 15-inch driver for the bottom end. If I did a bigger driver for the bass cabinet I’d have to decide if I was going have a sealed box, which is intriguing to me. I think you end up with faster, tighter bass… but then you have to make sure they [integrate]. On some levels you don’t want to get those horns too high off the ground, there are those constraints. I don’t want to make eight-foot tall speakers. I want it to be at human scale and I want it to fit into a space where its not out of sync with how you’re living.”
Resistor Mag: Looking back, what would say the biggest takeaway from the horn project was?
Christopher Hildebrand: “I just had so much fun doing it. I think I had more fun designing those speakers than I have designing anything in my career… friends, family and clients would walk in and their eyes would just widen. It was a “wow!” kind of thing. And also for that experience we as audiophiles all love, which is the hair on the back of your neck raising listening to something.”
Think of this like an online subscription. Your donation supports a unique space for me to smash-up music journalism, alternative culture, high fidelity reviews and give volume to those stories and voices lost in the white noise of mainstream hi-fi media. Plus, beer money.