Given the rarity of still functional Infinity and Ohm Walsh
loudspeakers in the 21st Century, is the Walsh-type tweeter the
greatest sounding tweeter that a new generation of audiophiles never even heard
of?
By: Ringo Bones
During the 1970s, there was a legendary tweeter invented by
famed audio pioneer Lincoln Walsh that was first widely used by the Ohm
Loudspeaker Company given that they were the first ones to acquire the patents,
Infinity then got permission to use these famed tweeters a few years later.
Given that they were praised during their day as the “most realistic sounding”
tweeter technology, how come the “Walsh Tweeter” is now largely forgotten?
For those who are lucky enough to still own a still
functional pairs – though you can use Google to find out what are these kind of
tweeters or what they look like – the Walsh Tweeter is that inverted gold cone
on top of the Infinity loudspeaker box. The Walsh-type tweeter is essentially a
standard tweeter motor with the voice coil and magnet attached to an
ice-cream-cone-shaped thin metal with damping inside. Invented by Lincoln
Walsh, the Walsh Tweeter is often associated with the Ohm Loudspeaker Company
who acquired the patents on their Ohm Walsh series.
The technology seems rather simple: Instead of a traditional
horizontal dome acting as a hemispherical piston facing the listener, the Walsh
Tweeter was a vertical pump attempting a 360-degree sphere of high frequencies
as in “omnidirectional radiation” of sound waves. Many audio manufacturers
still covet the design – like Warren Gregoire and Associates with their
Ikonoklast3 loudspeakers and MBL – though it struggled at higher frequencies
because of its high moving mass and large shape, although the MBL’s tweeter
design differs that from the Walsh-type tweeter because the MBL uses a flexible
metal balloon instead of a rigid ice-cream-cone-shaped radiator. Both designs
have trouble reaching past 12,000 Hz and is often used with a “conventional
shaped” dome tweeter being used as a “super tweeter” to generate signals above
12,000 Hz.
Given their limitations, anyone lucky enough to own a still
functional Ohm F loudspeaker swore that the Walsh Tweeters are the ideal
tweeter for reproducing Classical string quartets or similar small ensemble
Classical works, although some say Jimi Hendrix sounds “more interesting” on a
pair of Ohm F loudspeakers. The same holographic front-to-back imaging thing
also occurs on a pair of more recent Ikonoklast3 loudspeakers and similar MBL
Radialstrahler 101 loudspeakers.
