Enjoying Some Old Friends Regularly Once more

I’m talking about a pair of OHM L speakers that I bought originally in 1978.

These were the second pair of "good" hifi speakers I bought as a youth. I’ve mostly had them ever since. They were on the small end as good speakers tended to go back then but they look big now compared to many smaller monitor speakers out there today. They spent a few years with a relative I had given them to. I got them back around 2008 when I started to focus heavily on bringing my system up to snuff. I wanted to use these for reference before buying anything new having had and enjoyed them for a long time originally .

The woofer foam surrounds were rotted though. SO I decided to invest a few hundred $$$s to rebuild them myself. I selected a pair of very good quality Morel 8" woofers to replace the old and added OHM’s sub bass activation circuit that John Strohbeen uses in all his newer models.

Results were very good. I debated just going with these for a while at the time but then decided I needed to try more of the latest and greatest speaker technologies out there. I added several pair in various rooms since. The Ls got light duty in my unfinished rec room used mainly for background music during activities there.

Recently I decided to try corner placement in a couple rooms with good results using some other smaller monitors I own. Results were very good with that setup, making the small monitors sound much bigger than they were or had otherwise.

Last week, after reading about some modern speaker lines of similar ilk to the older OHM box designs (Harbeth and Spendor) I tried the OHM Ls in that room with the corner placement and wow. These sound wonderful and have no problem filling that room with beautiful near full range sound with excellent detail and top notch dynamics. Well beyond my expectations. A keeper again for sure!

The other thing to note is these older refurbed speakers benefit greatly from improvements in the amplifiers and source gear I use today compared to the past.

Its made me once again reconsider the value to be had in some older speaker designs that can benefit from careful application of more modern technologies in and around them.

For example, professionally refurbed and updated OHM Ls can be had direct from the OHM factory when available for a mere $500, the same price they cost new back in 1978. Where else can this much good sound be had for that cost these days? Plus OHM still provides service and upgrades for every speaker they have ever made in forty some  years of existence selling speakers . Now that’s value added for the buyer that is hard to find anywhere else!

Its been an enlightening experience to be able to actively compare gear I started with almost 40 years ago to their modern counterparts.

When it comes to speakers, I’ve confirmed that size does matter if one cares about real dynamics and high quality extended bass. Forty years ago, you got a lot of speaker for the money in terms of size and output capability compared to present but few perhaps had the electronics in front of them to truly make them shine. These days, it seems one can have the best of both worlds without breaking the bank even perhaps.