Originally Posted by
Mike Caldwell
The JBL 2344 horns are for lack of a better description made of dense plastic. Now there were two slightly different versions, the first version was 90% molded plastic with a metal flange throat bolted to the horn that you bolted the driver to. The later version was all one piece molded plastic, both sounded the same.
Those have not been made for about 25 years or so, the two part metal flange versions were in the early mid 80's.
You can run most horns outside of a cabinet but you can not operate a high frequency compression driver without a crossover network in one form or another.
Horns and drivers do not create hiss or noise, they only reproduce the what is coming into them from the sound system. Being that they are very high efficiency devices as in making a lot of sound with very little audio input level if your system has some background noise to it your going to hear it.
As for hearing vocals coming out of a horn that has to do with how the system is configured more than a specific choice of driver.
That said those horns were designed using the JBL 2425 and 2426 drivers but there are other driver choices today to pick from.