Walsh double Ohm

[Rich4349]

We don't commonly discuss other brands of speakers much here, but I think you'll agree with me that these are something... different. I don't get the vibe that these are snake oil / audiofool / or just plain junk, but I'm also still quite the novice. What do you make of the Walsh Ohms, specifically these custom bracketed "Double Ohms"?

Given the type of driver, I don't consider these a competing brand, but go easy if you think otherwise.


https://www.ebay.com/itm/222620421521

"The unique Walsh driver in operation. A single pulse travels down the cone, reproducing the entire audio range with one driver.

The line of Ohm Walsh speakers use a unique driver designed by Lincoln Walsh. Lincoln Walsh was a brilliant engineer who was part of the engineering team that developed radar during World War II. He later designed audio amplifiers, and his final project was a unique, one-way speaker with one driver. It was a large cone that faced down into a sealed, airtight enclosure. Rather than move back-and-forth as conventional speakers do, the cone rippled and created sound using a principle known as “transmission line”. The new speaker created a single, perfectly rendered sound wave of remarkable clarity."

[Seth]

Looks more like a double Dalek, from Dr. Who

Exterminate. EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE!!!

Interesting stuff. My mind's not in the space to dive in at the moment. Good to have it in the library for a future rabbit hole though.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

I don't know what it is, but I do know it's not a transmission line. Googling it the Walsh is an omni-directional speaker. These crop up from time to time claiming to give a more lifelike sound. But the sources that are recorded aren't omni-directional, so...

[Rich4349]

Yeah, I was PRETTY sure that was incorrect lol. I bought a pair of Hegeman omnis, and they have really good sound, in my opinion. I thought I remembered reading that they utilized various length or width rectangular Hemholtz resonators to achieve the bass, but now all I'm seeing is that they're a version of Davids! Folded bass horn below, omni mids and highs on top. Color me confused!

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hug/ ... 83247.html

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

It's similar, but seriously flawed. When you constrict the horn mouth in that fashion it does push the corner frequency down by a few Hz. That's probably why he did it. But it also totally messes up response above that. Also, that's a rear loaded folded horn. They have an unavoidable flaw, a response dip where the front and rear waves meet a half wavelength apart. You can see it on the SPL chart at 125Hz. The David is a front loaded horn. The only rear loaded horn we do is the TruckTuba. It avoids the response dip by crossing over to the midbasses below the dip frequency.

[Rich4349]

True, I didn't mean to imply they were the same, just had some overall similarities. My Hegemans are on a shelf, but from what I could feel way back by the basement wall, mine didn't seem to have a bottom slot. Weird.

Do you think the wider but slightly shallower dips at 490, 1200 and 2100 would have as much effect on sound quality?

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Maybe, but there's not much you can do about them.