And Now, For All You Omni Fanatics

Also just for fun and comparison here is the review of my F5s I did many moons ago when I Acquired them and still a youngster in these parts.

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/review-ohm-acoustics-walsh-5-series-3-speaker?highlight=Ohm%2...…..

and ta dah…..here they are still around today. 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/96SbeuZEWj5ueG8T8

Doug, thanks for your post and the review. I had a pair of the original Ohm Fs back in the mid-1970s -- still one of  my all time favs. I have a pair of the smaller Ohm 1000s these days, but with an added subwoofer, they do everything I want.

Doug,  thanks for this review.  On one hand, Ohm doesn't get much coverage and the coverage it does get often leaves the reader with unanswered questions.  On the other hand, they've been around for 50 years which says a lot about their products and service.  Add to that, you almost never see their products come up for resale and those that do seem to hold their value.

You've heard a lot of speakers and I'm sure that at the end of your review process you are left with a feeling of "this is a pretty good speaker and if I owned it, I could enjoy listening to it...or, this speaker has too many quirks that would drive me crazy"?

I'd like to boil all of my questions down to this one:  Assuming a potential Ohm customer is really into the big soundstage/immersion thing.....Is this a speaker that will make people want to listen to music because it just sounds good, or is it a speaker that will will have people scratching their head thinking the sound is lacking in some area/s?

The thing I like about Doug is he is a bonafide audiophile who talks about things like build quality, parts, engineering decisions and other technical issues relating to what is being listened to and he seems to have a lot of listening experience under his belt . Many Ohm owners are not necessarily audiophiles in that regard. So that makes what he has to say particularly interesting to me. The ohms were recommended to me personally by the late great reviewer John Potis, another bonafide music lover, audiophile and good guy who I think reviewed a pair he owned on sixmoons.com several years back.

Also the topic of Old versus new Ohm Walsh comes up often but this may be the first time a bonafide reviewer went to the trouble to have an old pair rebuilt and available for comparison. Good stuff!

Thank you all for the complements, I appreciate them. 

snapsc, regarding your ultimate question; for a person who values the bulbous soundstage and sense of grandeur above all, I believe the F5 would be very gratifying. Because it has a built in subwoofer, it can be downright impressive in presence and scale, two aspects that can yield a sense of an overwhelming experience. It's unusual capability to be contoured to nearly any set of electronics should satisfy all but perhaps the most hard core ESL or horn lovers. It is a legit dual purpose speaker for stereo and surround systems, should a person wish to use it for that, too. 

I was surprised by how handily the F5 outperformed the Walsh Model F - and that was with the vintage speaker being modified by removing half the dense dampening material and bypassing the fuse! The difference in capacity to perform at a very high level was strikingly in favor of the F5. Though it was not my intent to demonstrate it, as I had no idea how the comparison would turn out, the result once again supported my conclusion I reached years ago that vintage does not typically have the capability to perform on the level of contemporary designs. Looking into these older designs literally, there was nowhere near the fanatical attention given to cabinets, dampening, bracing, etc. that happens now, and the character of the performance is fundamentally different. Imo, modern cabinet making for speakers is on a higher level and my ears enjoy the difference. Imo, the appeal of vintage aesthetics is not enough to overcome the performance gap. YMMV