The book "High Quality Horn Loudspea
ker Systems" by Bjørn Kolbrek and Thomas Dunker was released in November 2019. This website will keep you up to date with availibility and distributors, and we also provide extra material and errata. The book is now in its second print run, and most of the errors from the first print run have been corrected.
Currently the book is available from Lean Business Audio and Parts Express.
We are a little behind schedule on the logistics of getting books off to Amazon due to delays with the printing and other factors. But pallets of books are in transit to amazon.co.uk as of Friday 11th. Bjørn and I are off to New York for the AES convention this week but we will continuously watch for updates from Amazon on the stock situation. Hopefully they'll be set to receive orders and ship books by the end of the week. As of now, the book will only be available from amazon.co.uk, but amazon users on other continents will be able to order the book from the UK site. We apologize for the inconvenience, but Bjørn has been doing his best to get the amazon sale going. Further updates will follow soon!
Bjørn and Thomas
The official launch of the book will take place at the 147th AES Convention at the Javits Center in New York. The conference is 16-19 October 2019. The book will be for sale in the AES Members Center, where we will also have two signing events:
Wednesday 12:30 to 14:00 (2:00 PM)
Friday12:30 to 14:00 (2:00 PM)
11:15 to 12:15 on Friday the 18th we, the authors, will give a tutorial on the two Western Electric compression drivers that marked the beginning of modern compression driver design. Right after this tutorial we will sign books at the AES Members Center.
Printing is finished, now binding and casing is next. There have been some delays, but today the first copy arrived at my desk. The next pallet will go to the AES Convention in New York, where will do a book signing event - more about that later.
As previously mentioned, the book is A4, 1070 pages, and it comes in at a solid 3.34kg.
It is immensely satisfying to receive the first hard copy of your work, and it's hard to stop looking through it!
The spine is designed in the style of the old classic textbooks.
We also included a bookmark, which we believe can be useful in a book this size.
As already known to some, the book "High Quality Horn Loudspeaker Systems" is being released this autumn. This website is set up on the occasion of this book being published. In the first place, it is intended to provide progress updates on the release and availability of the book. ...And what else? We are not quite sure yet, but we are already making room for some background information on our research and writing of the book. Later on, we think about adding supplemental and supportive resources related to the book and possibly other interesting updates on relevant research and developments. We can't exactly put the book away after it's been released, and we have to be around somehow as it reaches our readers.
The book as well as this website is about sharing knowledge and information. The communities out there sharing our fascination and interest in this technology are who we want to share our work with.
We, Dr. Bjørn Kolbrek and Thomas Dunker, both native Norwegians, have worked together on research into horn speaker technology since 2004. We are now proud to announce the arrival of the first comprehensive book devoted entirely to horn loudspeakers, covering more than a century of developments in engineering, theory and industrial applications of the technology. The book came about as a result of the snowballing extent of our research, making it necessary for us to organize a vast amount of knowledge, information and data. Truly being one of a kind, it is also intended to be a "one-stop reference" work and an extensive guide to existing literature on the subject. We know from 25 years of actual experience how time consuming and challenging it is to locate and collect literature on horns and horn speakers, some of it dating back as much as a century and published in obscure journals. ...Or at least how much one can end up with if not content with less than "all of it"... Even though computers and digital devices made this research effort and book work possible, we have spent a lot of time handling printed, even typed or handwritten paper with information never digitized before we came along. We are especially proud of how we have documented horn speaker developments in the 1920-1940 period in unprecedented depth.
The theory part of the book could have been a book in its own right, covering essentially all theoretical developments to date, connecting it to modeling and computer simulation methods, bridging science having its origins in the distant past with the technology of the present. We hope it will also provide useful guidance for future developments, even with different points of departure across the variety of schools and styles of horn speaker technology. The theory includes distortion mechanisms as well as perceptual and acoustical considerations, and further extends to a treatment of design principles for practical applications, covering transducers, horns and complete systems. This places horn speakers in the context of high quality sound reproduction, large portions of the theoretical treatments and considerations also having relevance to speaker systems in general.
The scope of the book is broad enough that as a whole, it can not easily be described in simple terms. The book is also in itself a system of information with extensive bibliographies, footnotes and cross references. It is intended to be studied and accessed as a whole and is therefore published in a single (admittedly heavy) volume. The subject is complex and challenging and we feel that a printed book is the only appropriate format, more easily attracting undivided attention to its contents. (The table of contents for the book counts 17 pages as things ultimately turned out.) We have been committed to write the kind of book about horn speakers that we ourselves have always wished would exist. As this task was completed after more than a century of developments, the summary would have to be extensive and in its scope it would cover subjects of interest to different groups of readers. Some short articles saying more about the background of our research, the contents of the book, our objectives and the book presentation are provided in the "About" section on the top menu.
At the moment the 1000 first copies of the book are being printed in the UK. The book is scheduled for release on Amazon in mid-October 2019, this year also marking the centennial anniversary of the publishing of A.G. Webster's horn theory "Acoustic Impedance and the Theory of Horns and of the Phonograph" that got the ball rolling making this technology a truly scientific subject a hundred years ago.
We will be present for a book signing at the 147th AES Pro Audio Convention in New York City, October 16.-18.
The book will sell for USD150, available only in hardcover, with a quality sewn binding and printed on silk finish paper, 1070 pages, richly illustrated. We think we can promise you a treasure trove of information and knowledge about horn speaker technology, based on resources in our archive and our long term research of the subject.
And oh, do watch out for our articles on this site containing additional background information on our research and on the book, under the "Extra Material" and "About" menu headings.
The fourth print run has been delivered, and this time we managed to get it done before we ran out of stock, so hopefully nobody noticed. We now should have plenty stock for your Christmas shopping!
The books were actually delivered at the end of June, but due to a malware attack on this site we weren't able to publish it. We sincerely hope nobody were affected by the malware, our web host seems to have taken the site down fairly quickly. After a bit of work we managed to recreate everything, so the site should be safe now; the old install is completely gone.
The second print run recently sold out, but don't worry! A third print run is under way with delivery to the warehouse 16 May. For customers buying from Lean Business Audio the book should be available shortly after that, for Parts Express customers it will take a little longer as we need to ship stock over.
We have received the new batch of books from the printer, they are now currently in our warehouse, ready to be sent out to our distributors. Lean Business Audio is local and should be able to get books on short notice, so if they haven't updated their website, send them a message and let them know you want to buy a book. It will take a little longer to get stock to Parts Express as we need to ship overseas, but things are moving.
The corrected manuscript has been submitted to the printer, and we have received a proof of some of the pages to make sure the images print well. As some of you may have noticed, some of the pictures in the first printing were very dark, and this should hopefully now have been corrected.
The printer informed us that due to Brexit and Covid, some print companies have been forced to downsize or close, so there's currently a shortage of print capacity in the UK. CPI Print, which we use, also have an unprecedented volume of work. The lead time for the book is therefore longer than anticipated. It looks like production will not start up until mid or late January, with additional lead times in order to get the books out to Lean and Parts Express. We are sorry we weren't able to get the books ready for Christmas, but at least it's moving forward!
We will keep you updated.
The book is now nearly sold out. The last few copies are on their way to Parts Express now and should be available on their website soon.
Thanks to everyone who bought a copy!
The stock ran out quicker than expected, but don't worry: we plan to do a new print run soon. We wanted to correct some typos first, but these will just be minor corrections of mistakes. The content will be the same as the firt printing, and all important (factual and mathematical) corrections will be listed in the Errata section on this website.
