Ohm Walsh Micro Talls: who's actually heard 'em?

Peter I think JS goal as I read it is to give great sound for reasonable cost.  Not build a race engine.   Every engineer has a different vision.   Also a business must make a profit and ohm has been around and us based in Brooklyn for many years.   So it's a model that seems to work and hopefully continues to.   I will say prices have gone up in recent years but still us made.   I paid less than half of list for my 5s with sale price and trade ins a great deal for the sound.   Granted there are many good speakers at ohm retail prices these days but nothing like them.   

I could see the benefits of the hot melt glue to attach the braces to my old cabs.  Would help absorb vibrations I'd think.   In some apps more of s convenience perhaps but a very effective one.  Looks would be one downside but out of sight out of mind I guess.  

Maybe John will read this and adapt some of your ideas.   I'd love to hear the esotar tweeter in my ohms personally. 

Hey Mapman....

If you feel like fiddling I'll be more than happy to let you borrow the 
ribbon tweeters for testing. You might have to take things apart and do some simple soldering but it's worth it for sure. 
Just let me know.

You never know until you eff it up.....🇸🇪

Mapman - The 7 kHz roll-in for the tweeter, IIRC, was mentioned somewhere on the old Ohm web site.  Next month, I will be hearing the German Physiks speakers, which use a Dick's Dipole Walsh-type driver for all but the low bass frequencies.  No tweeter, just like the F's.  In fact, a dealer told me the inspiration for the German Physiks was the Ohm Walsh speakers.  The designer wondered what could be done with fewer cost constraints than Ohm was under.  They do roll off above 18 kHz, but I see no reason why the Ohm Walsh drivers can't go higher than 2 or 3 kHz.  The beaming you would get from a full range, forward radiating 8" driver should be ameliorated by the Walsh omni radiating pattern, I would think.  I would bet that listening to Walshes without the tweeter would not be as treble-less sounding as the graph suggests.  That said, just looking at the Fs is instructional.  It has no tweeter, but the tall cone shape of the driver suggests it can reproduce higher frequencies from the narrower portions of the cone, near the top.  Current Walsh drivers appear to be conventional, shallow cones that lack the tall profile of the Ohm F drivers.  Hence the super-tweeter.  That John was able to adapt the Walsh principles to a design using conventional drivers speaks volumes about his ability to design speakers, and to keep costs down, which is probably the reason for the change in driver design.  And, I fully agree, the proof is in the listening.  John simply knows how to voice speakers.  A production version of what Peterr53 is going to end up with would probably be priced in the $20,000 range, or more.  

Peterr53 - While I have no doubt the Ohms can be improved by using a higher quality tweeter, I do question the wisdom of moving the crossover from 7 kHz to ~2.5 kHz.  One of the things that makes the Ohm Walsh speakers special, IMHO, is that there is no crossover in that critical 2-5 kHz range.  Very few conventional speakers that I have heard with crossovers in that range sound good to me in the upper mid/lower treble range.  But with your digital crossover, you will have total flexibility to dial in the crossover as you feel it sounds best.

peter I appreciate that but I am getting the sound I want and no time or interest in dabbling inside my Walshes at present.

My goal when I got back into this stuff several years back was to find the right speakers first and do whatever needed to get exactly the sound I wanted from there. My path was from OHM to Maggie to B&W and back to OHM in my bigger room over the course of about 25 years.   I’ve done many tweaks around the speakers to get exactly the sound I wanted since I got them almost 10 years ago now (wow). I will say the sound can vary widely based on all the typical suspects that affect how speakers sound and what I have now is in another league from when I started. Many ways to skin the cat.

Maybe if something heads south, but I gotta say that I’ve owned OHM Walshes since 1982 and the only issues I have ever had were the internal braces on my original Walsh 2s come loose inside and have to be reset. Those speakers did move around the country in the back of my car a lot in those days. I am more settled now and my current OHMs mostly stay put.

I did refabric the hoods of my old Walsh 2s as well using a beige colored loose wove wool fabric mainly to please my wife aesthetically. Those were part of teh trade in I did for my current F5 series 3.