The Walsh Type Tweeter: The Greatest Tweeter Most Audiophiles Never Heard Of?

Given the rarity of still functional Infinity and Ohm Walsh loudspeakers in the 21^st 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.