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


Hi,

I'd love to hear the impressions of people who've actually spent some time with these speakers to share their sense of their plusses and minuses. Mapman here on Audiogon is a big fan, and has shared lots on them, but I'm wondering who else might be familiar with them.
rebbi
1st try? You must be joking ;-)

As easy as the measurement process is I ended up doing several. In fact, each time I swap anything in/out of my system I feel the need to remeasure, realizing, of course, it's the room I'm measuring and not the gear. Still, I can't help thinking everything matters.

I do hear immediate and obvious improvement with no problems in the higher frequency spectrum, no missing sparkle. Honestly, I'm experiencing more clarity and focus which makes the top end sound more detailed, more believable. Have you played around with the gain settings at all?

BTW, I wasn't sure if the omni presentation of the Ohm's would work well with room correction. I'm hoping there are more of us too.
Tweaking is key to getting things right with any setup, including with OHMS.

In general, less separation between speakers and/or distance from rear wall helps with center imaging.

Imaging and soundstage with OHM omnis is significantly different than what most are used to with more conventional directional designs. The soundstage tends to be more detached from actual speaker location and more based on room acoustics and location relative to listening position than more conventional directional design speakers.

You have to listen more to the room and not the speakers in order to get a handle on things. SOundstage and imaging is typically totally detached from actual speaker location and more determined by room geometry when things are going well.

For example, my OHM 5s are both located right of center along the wider base wall of my L shaped room, but sound from mono recordings tend to come from dead center between the walls, almost to the left of the leftmost speaker.

US a good quality mono recording to help get a handle on center focus and imaging. Generally, when a good mono recording sounds well focused and centered, stereo recordings will also naturally come into their own as well.

Furniture or other large objects between speakers can definitely have an effect as with most any speaker.
My level of dissatisfaction with iRC is not great. I tried a DSPeaker Anti-Mode when they first came out. I could not detect a significant improvement so I returned the unit. Add that experience to this one and I have sort of concluded that my space is not particularly bad other than being too small (is-speakers closer to walls than optimum. All I really wanted was to smooth out the bass and iRC ha accomplished that pretty well. Now I will try tweaking speaker placement, etc to get better imaging if possible.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge, guys.
While I'm not technically as proficient as a lot of the people in this thread, I do have experience with the MWT's in home theater without a center, and with Audyssey.

As mentioned before, if there is hole in the image, they are too far apart. If too close, they sound like a single mono source. Best thing about Ohm's is there seems to be a lot of wiggle room.

With room correction, even the basic Audyssey worked quite well, especially in taming some shrill highs in a cavernous room we had last year.

However, I thought that old-fashioned experimentation and basic room treatment gave even better results. I definitely have more detail and soundstage without the room correction.
If you sit in the sweet spot of a conventional speaker, would the Ohm's differ if you dropped them into the same spot? IOW, is it only when you start moving out of the sweet spot that omni speakers start to shine?

(My apologies if this has been asked already.)