An OHM owner! Talk to me Goose! I am a phone call away from placing an order. Love my ZU's and have plenty of rooms in my house for them to go. But I have been researching OHM lately and they look like a speaker I could live with, well forever. Obviously you love yours, you've had them for 12 years, that says a lot. So tell me more about them. Do they play EVERY music genre well? I've had so many speakers in and out of my two channel room lately that sound great with this genre of music and absolutely horrible with others. I test speakers out with a lot of industrial and death metal. Can the OHM's rock out with that and punch you in the chest? I'm not talking a party speaker just a dynamic, engaging speaker. One that can keep up with double kick drums. But then play Diana Krall with finesse and grace.
And do you think a 10x12 room with 8 foot ceilings is too small for a 2000? I was leaning towards a 1000 but think I want the extra muscle of an 8" driver.
I have owned OHM Speakers for nearly 40 years (first Ohm Walsh II, then upgraded to Walsh 100s about 15 years ago). You do not need "extra muscle", the 1000 will be *plenty*. The original Walsh II was no great shakes playing bass but any of the newer generation has *completely blown me away" for the quantity and quality of the bass from such a small driver. Normally that also means horrific coloration/resonance, but ,ine have none of that. The only issue I had with the upgrade version was that it took *an eternity* to loosen up enough to play midrange well, hundreds of hours. After the upgrade, it was like someone threw a bath towel over the emitter. But lots and lots of playing later (some of it at my buddy's house), like several hundred hours, then it was back to remarkable clean imaging and greatly improved bass.
One thing that most Walsh owners have noted is that when you are in another room, the wide sound field makes it seem like the players are right there, and if you walked in, you would see them. This is much different from other speakers, and more-or-less unique to any of them that I have heard, all the way back to the A and F. It's really uncanny.
I can't say enough about the Ohm company, they are absolutely stellar for support and guidance. When I originally got the Walsh IIs in 1bout 1984, the relatively limited bass extension led me to get the Ohm N2 subwoofer. I was very dissatisfied that, it didn't play any deeper, just more volume in the same range. I tried a bunch of stuff including trying to reduce the output, really never worked out, so I just put it in the closet and forgot about it - for 30 years. One of my model airplane buddies got some little monitor speakers for his new system, and it desperately needed a subwoofer. I remembered the Ohm subwoofer, so we pulled it out and tried it. It was some improvement in this case, but nothing to really write home about.
After about a week, we noticed that the foam rubber surround (used only on the subwoofers as far as I know) was falling apart. Ohm offers replacements for a very good price so we got replacement drivers. While we were on the phone, we mentioned the overlap problem, and that we didn't really get much extension. The owner (John Strohbeen) said he had never actually seen an N2, but he would look into it. When the drivers showed up, he also put in a couple of (clearly custom-made) reflex port inserts and some foam to wrap them with. We put in the drivers, tried it, OK, it's not falling apart, but not a lot different performance-wise. Then we inserted the port inserts and BAM, tons of very well-defined bass with tremendous extension. It made the whole system work, immediately much better, like you were enveloped in bass - not overbearing, but so deep it was now a "presence".
No charge!
So, this is a company that knows what they are doing, and will go out of their way to make something work for you. FVA is like that, and Ohm is like that and if you have been doing this as long as I have, you would now how exceptionally rare this is. Most audio suppliers have the ethics of alley cats, and the exceptions really stand out. They also won't try to upsell you, you put in the room volume, and they tell you which speaker to get, and it's based on what you need - again, just like Frank did above - not how much money they want to get out of you.
The speakers may or may not be to your liking (I have B&W Nautilus 803 in my A system), but I can give you a 100% unadulterated recommendation for Ohm Acoustics as a business.
Brett
