German Physiks - Listening Impressions Wanted

Kenny - All the information on current and recent Ohm speakers you could possibly want is on this huge Audiogon thread -

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/ohm-walsh-micro-talls-who-s-actually-heard-em

It’s a long slog, but if you want a feel for what the Ohm’s are like, the only thing that would be more helpful would be an in-home demo (Ohm offers a 120-day in home trial, but you lose the round-trip shipping). Mapman may disagree, but I have long called my 2000s the "poor man’s German Physiks or MBL Radialstrahler". But the gap in sound, IMHO, is not nearly as large as the gap in price.

@audiotroy - Exactly. The reason I suggested the OP read through that huge Ohm Walsh thread was to get a feel for the kind of audiophile that likes the omni presentation, the pros and cons of it. It was that thread that lead me to try an in-home demo of the Ohms. For my taste, there was enough image specificity. There might not be enough for everyone.

I do beg to differ on the room treatment issue with omnis, though. Too much absorption defeats the whole point of an omni. The sound is supposed to bounce off the room surfaces; that is what creates the large soundstage. In my room, singers are properly sized on good recordings, with the singer’s apparent hieght at about 5.5’. They may produce images a little larger than life, but I prefer that to the miniaturized images many speakers produce. I actually have removed some of the absorption panels I had up from when I had more conventional dynamic speakers. I have a 60" plasma TV behind and in the middle of the Ohms. Covering this with a thick blanket actually sounds worse than just leaving it alone. I do plan on adding more diffusion, since my room is smaller than I would like, but the point is, I think, that as long as they are not too close to the adjacent walls, omnis should be allowed to bounce their sound off of them.

I would never expect an audio reviewer to use omnis as a review tool. Dispassionate neutrality is not really what omnis and their fans are all about. As JV of TAS would say, these are speakers by and for the "as you like it" crowd. I make no apologies for being a part of that crowd. I hear a lot of loudspeakers in the course of a year, and with rare exceptions, none of them that I can afford appeal to me as much as my Ohms. After all, if there were only one "correct" speaker, eveyone would own the same thing. But everyone hears differently and, as you said, values different aspects of reproduced sound differently.