UNSOUND:
I don't mean to take credit away from Lincoln Walsh ... he refined the bending-wave concept into an omni design. He also managed to create a very wide-bandwidth concept. It remained a concept, commercialized by someone else (Gersten) who invented the voice coil without which it would nto have been possible. By all rights the driver should be referred to as the Walsh/Gersten driver because of that fact.
Next: The Peter Dicks driver parts ways with the Ohm driver in several ways. First of all, it was modeled more accurately. While Walsh was a genius (and so was DaVinci), he was unable to accurately model the concept in a way that would make it reliable. Dicks was able to do that. It is hardly "slanted" to say that - them's the facts.
I'm curious as to why you would take it so personally that someone might challenge the "genius" of Walsh? And it's not even a challenge, per se, but rather an assessment of the facts as regards the differences between the Walsh/Gersten driver and the DDD? Why so touchy?
The Walsh/Gersten driver resulted in failure. There are very few remaining working models in the field that have not been refurbished/repaired at least once in their lifetimes, and the design was abandoned by the company because it seems to have been a guaranteed liability. Their terrible inefficiency required tremendous power just to wake the driver up, and a little bit more power melted the voice coils.
Still - it remains one of the most interesting and well-regarded drivers in the history of the industry, and credit should be given where it is due to Lincoln Walsh for having conceived of the idea. You are 100% correct to say that he was not to blame for the failure rates as he was deceased before it was ever commercialized. Had he lived, he may have been able to figure out the answers to the problems. As it stands, it was Gersten who is both to be given credit for and blame for the commercial result of the driver.
MAPMAN: You're right to assume that as the frequencies get lower and wavelengths get longer the drivers behave more pistonically. You're also right to say that the Ohm F's and A's (as well as the GP Unicrns) are the only such drivers to have behaved full range. As a result, the Ohm drivers failed often because their voice coil was called on to move the entire mass of that massive driver cone ... and the power required to make the driver "wake up" and play at decent levels was just about enough to kill the VC's.
To this day the most engineering experience with this kind of driver comes from Peter Dicks and German Physiks. Together they have logged almost 20 continuous years of R&D into this driver with access to very advanced computer modeling along the way.
It is fair to say that Lincoln Walsh was the "father" of this kind of driver. I've read the patent he filed in 1964 and it reveals to me a prodigious intellect. It is also fair to say that Peter Dicks and German Physiks made this style of driver reliable, predictable, and much more efficient.
I'm sorry, Unsound, if this somehow ruffles your feathers. I didn't mean to offend you. In fact ... I didn't think it *could* offend you.