THE LAST LOUDSPEAKER.
The news may already have reached you.
We're a young company named Ohm Acoustics and we've developed the last loudspeaker.
We believe it's the last loudspeaker in the same sense as the wheel was the last device for transmitting rotary or rolling motion.
Of course, the wheel has been greatly improved since its debut in the Bronze Age. But only in construction. The design itself is un-improvable because it's inherently perfect.
The new Ohm F has the same mathematical finality. It's the absolute loudspeaker, utterly simple and complete. Only its physical makeup can evolve further; the concept is terminal.
The last loudspeaker was invented by a little-understood engineering genius, Lincoln Walsh, who patented it in 1969 (U. S. Patent 3,424,873) and died less than three years later. As exclusive licensees of the Walsh patent, we've spent the past two years developing construction techniques for the invention. The end result is the Ohm F. The originality and stark simplicity of the Walsh design are apparent at a glance. A single, very steep 12-inch cone, oriented with its apex up and convex side out, is used to reproduce the entire audio range from 30 to 20,000 Hz without crossovers. (Not to be confused with the 2-inch Walsh tweeter made by another company under license from Ohm.)
The cone is made of titanium, aluminum and paper, and it acts as a wave transmission line, completely discarding the classic piston theory of speaker design. Its output is a unique cylindrical wave front, which is kept in perfect phase with the input audio signal at all frequencies. This is "coherent sound", analogous to coherent light from a laser.
No other full-range speaker is a totally coherent sound source, with 360° direct radiation to boot. It's the theoretical ultimate.
The Ohm F comes in a striking, tapered column cabinet, about 3 1/2 feet high, and is priced at $400. (Also available is the $1000 laboratory prototype Ohm A, with an 18-inch Walsh driver that goes down to 20 Hz but requires 350 watts of power.) As the years go by and the history of the wheel is repeated, the Walsh idea will inevitably filter down to the lowest price ranges.
Meanwhile, the Ohm F is here for those who want to be the first to own the last loudspeaker.
Ohm Acoustics Corp., 206 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11205. Ohm
(Source: Audio magazine, Sept. 1973)
Also see:
Ohm Walsh 5 Loudspeaker (Equip. Profile, Jun. 1988)