Ohm Speakers, thoughts?

Sean,

Maybe what looks like a 'conventional' woofer is actually some new type of driver. A conventional woofer and tweeter would not produce the sound that I get from my speakers. As I've stated previously I don't see how the imaging could be improved. Perhaps the older models are better as you state.
Regards,
7p62mm

I own a pair of Walsh 300's which I bought in 1999. Overall, I am very happy with them. Advantages: 1)excellent midrange and great sound stage. Don't have to sit in the sweet spot for good results. 2)Decent bass response. 3) Reasonable price range. 4) Easy to set up. Don't have to spend a lot of time to get them positioned for good sound. Disadvantages: 1)not very efficient. They take a lot of power to play at loud levels. I currently drive mine with a Bryston 4B (250 watts @ 8 ohms). 350 watts would be better. 2) At high levels the bass seems to distort somewhat. I plan to fix this by adding a Velodyne subwoofer someday. 3)Fit and finish is not that great. I am disappointed here. 4)Internal wiring and interconnect quality is somewhat low. I plan to re-wire the speakers someday. There is room for improvement here; but, I doubt that it would make much diffence in the sound quality. Overall, I am very happy. My friends like them too. I don't agree with the gentlemen who says that looking at the guts of the driver soured him on the sound. It amazes me that you get so much high quality sound out of relatively small driver. Another plus is that if one fails out of warranty then they only cost around a grand to replace. Note: I have not had to do this up to now. That's my take on them.

Sean,

I never opened the sealed can so I can't comment as to what is inside. Whatever it is it works great in my opinion.

Best regards,
7p62mm

The Walsh driver handles the low end up through the midrange. It is crossed over to a tweeter for the high end. Not sure about the crossover point or what order filter it is. You will have to contact Ohm for this info. The Walsh driver acts like a line source and thus is omnidirectional. Ohm installs a piece of felt on the driver to reduce its emmission to 180 degrees. This is done to prevent back reflections. The driver is phase and time aligned. According to Ohm's literature this results in a single arival from each speaker. From my experience this is true and results in excellent imaging. You can hear both channels even when you are not in the listening room. The nominal impedance is 6 ohms. The drivers are round cans and are installed in a vented column enclosure. There is a single set of contacts on the bottom of the column and the crossover is internal to the can so it is not biampable. Placement is very simple. You need to set further back than the distance between the speakers. If you use them for surround sound then will want to go with a processor and separate amps as you want a least 250 watts to run them.

Overall I like the speakers a lot. My only complaint is that it takes a lot of power to make them play loud. There are other speakers that are more efficient with better dynamic range. I doubt that anything else will provide better imaging though. Hope this helps.

Sean,

I think that you are mistaken about the design of the newer Ohm drivers. The reason that I say this is from reading Ohm's literature and from listening to the speakers. If the can was just a woofer/tweeter combination then you would not get the line source type of sound from them. That said I agree with your comments about the speaker's performance. The area where they come up short is that they won't deliver high SPL's. If you try to overdrive them then the protection circuitry will start to kick in. (This happened to me last night. I was running a high blood alcohol level and cranked it up too high). My thoughts about correcting this is to add a separate sub woofer to handle the low end. Unfortunately I can't afford to do this at present. Gold at $350 will change my life. Check out DROOY, HGMCY, and NEM. Take care bud.