I have a question about the outdoor speakers. Our baseball coach is looking for a way to put speakers up at the baseball field and I am wondering if the outdoor models would be able to handle an area that big without straining badly and having problems. What he is wanting to do is be able to do is play music at the ball field for pregame and maybe use it for anouncements. I hate listening to horn speakers that sound harsh and horrible. I have been to so many ballparks that sound so bad it hurts my ears. I love my axioms and I wondered if this would be a viable idea. If this could work what would I use as an amp?

someone posted this question a while and I think the response was "probably not". I don't the the m3's are designed for large listening areas where you would need to play over a potential cheering crowd.

I think that you will need to go with some outdoor comercial grade speakers.

But, How big of a field are you talking about?

Talking about a baseball field. Want to be able to hear it out in the outfield. Does anyone know of speakers that are not horns that could do this. Horns are so harsh on your ears I find at the fields.

If he has a $10,000~ $20,000 budget, I'm sure there are options....

But horns are going to be the way to go. There are little, feeble, "horn-sounding" horns, and there are the big ones that stadiums use....

You need very, very sensitive speakers (or min 1000Watts!) for stadiums. Horn senstivity is typically 110 dB (1w/m). For M3 (88 db 1w/1m), you would need 200 watt for each 1 watt of power for the horns. To hear it in the outfield, you would probably need at least 10 times that.

Bighorns.

You need something like this

http://www.meyersound.com/products/concertseries/cq-1/

disclosure - I work there

typically stadium speakers are designed with the horn style to get the volume out over a large area, and yes as people have said they are far more efficient to drive for this purpose.
somehow I doubt stadium speakers are designed for the kind of quality you hear in your home stereo system
I'm not sure anyone could hear really good sound quality over the loud cheering crowd or other background noise at a stadium anyway
the nuances I'm sure would be lost

Some of our horn loaded speakers sound pretty darn good, but I agree they can't compete in sound fidelity with higher end home speakers. Different design constraints. They have to be very loud, durable in harsh environments, etc.

You guys are the ones that Mythbusters uses, right?

Yes, the infamous Brown note episode. Let me know if you ever want to come by for a tour.

I know many audiophiles consider horns to sound like crap, but that's taking it a bit too far