What are your thoughts in this Caesar?
Why launch into an understanding of horns with a focus only on negative concerns? Surely if you are looking to a balanced understanding of horns then you need to also consider the virtues as well as constraints of horn design.
In my opinion Caesar raises the issues that many, if not most, audiophiles have with horns. I welcome his questions, challenges, objections, whatever, as he's giving us horn guys the invitation to crawl out of our comfortable niches and speak up.
As for focusing on the negative, that's actually MOST of what I do as a designer. Imo a worthy loudspeaker system must do two things:
First, it must do SOMETHING so well that you can focus on that quality and suspend disbelief and get lost in the music. That something can be timbre, imaging, coherence, PRAT, envelopment, presence, slam, disappearing act, whatever, or (better still) multiples thereof.
Second, the speaker system must NOT do anything so poorly that it collapses the happy illusion just created. THIS is BY FAR the hardest part.
And imo it is perfectly appropriate to challenge horns over the shortcomings that many exhibit, and which perhaps a few (but hopefully growing) number do not. Ime it is doing something distractingly WRONG (rather than failing to do anything magically RIGHT) that is most likely to trip up a horn system.