equiem mid-horns

The Equiem midrange horn grew out of a previous design that earned the nickname, “Star Wars horns”. Many people who visited my home asked me about the feasibility of engineering and marketing these “Star Wars horns,” but this would have been a tricky task, to say the least. 

I eventually developed an optimized design that is marketed under the product name VZA Equiem. This design improves on the original “Star Wars horn” concept in many ways. The original design served as a test bed used to explore and push performance limits, including output. The original system design philosophy centers on the idea of letting a powerful horn-loaded sub handle the heavy lifting below 125 Hz, while a high-efficiency mid horn and tweeter horn carry the mid and high frequencies. 

This approach allows for the use of small “flea-powered” (3 watts) single-ended triode amps or larger solid-state amplifiers.

The ultimate design goal of these systems was realism and a larger-than-life scaled presentation. The entire design goal of the Equiem horn system is to keep the signal path as clean as possible by reducing or eliminating man-made interferences like crossover components in the signal path. This meant that all design parameters in the horn had to be optimized and maximized to achieve this goal. 

The Equiem mid-horn runs from 125 Hz all the way to 20,000 Hz using a single full-range 8” driver. What is unique about this is that there are no crossover components in the signal path between the amplifier and the driver to contaminate the signal. 

The second aspect to keep in mind is that the entire frequency range from 125Hz to 20,000Hz is handled by a single driver. The benefit of this is that there is no handing off of frequency bands from one driver to another. Everything is carried seamlessly by a single driver, keeping the entire signal intact and phase coherent. There are no phase shifts occurring anywhere in the entire range from 125Hz to 20,000Hz. This ensures a clean, uncontaminated signal.

The Equiem also includes a double-stack horn-loaded AMT tweeter array that comes in at 8,000Hz, utilizing a simple first-order single-capacitor network. This arrangement provides a tremendous amount of natural ambient acoustic air and spatial information around instrumentation and vocals. The AMT horns are extremely fast, dynamic, airy, and free of compression and distortion. The tweeter horns are perfectly time-aligned with the main 8” driver.

The Equiem horns are designed to be partnered with a high-output horn-loaded subwoofer like the BB-15 to complete the picture. Regular low-efficiency subwoofers will unfortunately not be able to keep up with the high-speed demands set by the Equiem horns.

We are currently working on manufacturing and finishing options. The unit we had on display at SWAF 2026 was our pre-production model. Please join our Priority Access List to receive exclusive updates on pricing, finish options and availability information.