The folks at Ohm would love to have us believe that there "is no place like Ohm." I know Dorothy believes that, but last time I listened to the Walsh 5 there were enough things wrong with it to spoil the Ohm-coming. To be sure, there was plenty of imaging magic; you might even say that, indeed, "there's no space like Ohm." But a slightly opaque and colored midrange seriously curtailed my enthusiasm for the speaker. All puns aside, I firmly believed back then that this was a speaker on the verge of greatness. So when Ohm let it be known late in 1987 that the Walsh 5 had been revised, I was naturally more than interested in a relisten.

I was unable to specifically pin down the nature or extent of the modifications, but even after a quick initial listen my impression was that the speaker had been significantly improved. The midrange was smoother and considerably more transparent. I suppose that transparency and disdain of boxy colorations are acquired tastes; years of intimacy with electrostatics have made me quite intolerant of muddled resonant boxes. The art has advanced greatly in the last 50 years, yet dynamic moving-coil manufacturers are still boxing box resonances. Heroic enclosures like the one used in the Celestion SL600 are a step in the right direction. Not surprisingly, the mini-monitors, the miniature boxes, are the least boxy-sounding because of the reduction in panel area: there is simply less radiating surface. Unfortunately, most little boxes are bass cripples. A good example of this is the ProAc Tablette. Its lack of bass and gratuitous brightness conspire to give it an artificial sense of transparency which many people like. I know I liked it. But J. Gordon Holt, Mr. Tonal Balance, was appalled: "violins sound like toy violins," he would complain. But Gordon, what do you expect from a castrato anyway?