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

@fyusmal....Although I would be pleased to have you over for demo of my 2000s, I live in New Jersey, so you would have to alter your travel plans. I am very close to Newark Liberty Airport, about 10 minutes away.

I am totally with you on the music limitations thing. Some speakers are tuned to work best with classical, or acoustic jazz, or even any well recorded music. The beauty of my Ohms is that, while they don’t turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse, you get the feeling that you at least understand why the engineers on a poor recording made the choices they did. For example, they really wanted the guitar to dominate, and the drums were sacrificed to emphasize the guitar. But I listen to a very wide variety of genres, and I enjoy them all on the Ohms.

A true story: An audiophile friend with nearly $200,000 invested in his rig had speakers that were custom made to his specifications, complete with huge outboard crossovers, & powered subs.

This audiophile is a hardcore classical music fan and choir members. On his classical and opera recordings, his system is amazing. On one visit I asked him to indulge me and let me play a great, but poorly recorded CD of psychobilly by The Reverend Horton Heat on his system. It was AWFUL. Completely unlistenable. On my Ohms, my feet are tapping, and my head is bobbin’, and my hand is slapping a big imaginary standup bass.

I have heard some great panel speakers, costing $25,000 or more, but none I would trade my modest Ohm 2000s for.

Thanks, Mapman, for your thoughts regarding the Tektons v the Ohms. Would you elaborate further on what you perceived as the differences between the two, aside from the greater efficiency of the Tektons?

The other key differences would be

1) size and sound dispersion pattern differences which would determine which might work best/synergize with your specific room, always a key concern for getting the best sound possible out of any particular room.

2) Bass levels. This will vary greatly in a particular room depending on placement and may be hard to get right with the wrong speakers in the room. Closer to walls and even more so corners will boost bass levels whereas some distance from walls is needed for a good sound stage and imaging if those are areas of concern for you . Ohms can go surprising close to walls if needed and the speaker size and associated cost will determine the bass levels. Larger and smaller Walsh models are designed to sound the same. The diffference is which will work best in a room of a particular size. There is a calculator on teh site to help determine and always worth a discussion with Ohm to determine best. There are different Tekton models available to match best to a room but each tends to have a somewhat different design and I would anticipate different corresponding sound. The ones I heard were Double Impact in a typical hotel sized room. They did surprisingly well in there off of a relatively low powered tube amp as I recall.

I’m sure there are other timbral differences between Ohm and Tekton but my exposure to Tekton is too limited to say other than in my one limited audition with a tube amp for about 30 minutes I found the Tekton Double Impact timbre to be pleasing and easy on the ears in a fairly near field configuration much like every OHM Walsh I have ever heard in various setups over the years. I’ve owned and continue to enjoy Ohm Walsh and other lines for almost 40 years now amazingly enough. I’ve always used SS amps with my OHMs and have never heard them off a tube amp, though I know others here have gone that way.

3) The only speakers I have heard that compete with OHM in regards to delivering live-like imaging and soundstage is mbl. Others may do soundstage and imaging quite well but many recordings will still sound like recordings whereas the OHMs deliver a live-like presentation with most any recording, including monophonic recordings, which really opens up a lot of new highly-rewarding listening possibilities that might be overlooked otherwise. They always sound like the performers are in your room. I would say OHMs are a unique speaker for music lovers.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

I should qualify that I have run my OHMS off two SS amps designed to deliver sound like a tube amp: Carver m4.0t and Tube Audio Design Hibachis. These both sounded Ok but it takes a more highly damped, beefy, high current, low output impedance SS amp to make the OHMs sing best. More watts like that will get you higher SPLs with the Ohms and they do that very well. I have found good quality modern Class D amps tend to do that in smaller more affordable packages and these tend to really get the most possible out of OHM Walsh speakers and that is a lot. You can throw the kitchen sink at them and they will never sound stressed or compressed. Most any amp will run out of gas first.

I use my Ohms in my two larger rooms. I use Bel Canto ref1000m amps 500w/ch into 8 ohms, high current delivery, with my big OHM 5s (12 inch driver with 4 three way level adjustments to tune for use in most any room) and this setup does it all. I use smaller but similar 60 w/ch Bel Canto c5i integrated with my OHM 100s (8" driver). The only limitation there is how loud and dynamic I can go which is still quite up there by most standards but not rock concert or symphony hall level loud like I can in my bigger setup.

I switched (ha!) to a Class D amp a few months ago.  10k input impedance and 500 watts per channel.  Still breaking it in.  I will have more to say about it with my 2000s, but for now, I concur with everything mapman says about high power class D amps and Ohms.