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I like Brooklyn. I even got married under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge! (Almost the exact spot where Cher's grandfather let his dogs howl at the moon in Moonstruck. And if you're ever in the Park Slope area, check out McFeeley's for brunch.) I could be forgiven, therefore, for having a soft spot for any Brooklyn manufacturer, including Ohm Acoustics. Except that the only Ohm model I have heard was the omnidirectional Ohm Walsh 5 (favorably reviewed by Dick Olsher in Stereophile in 1987, Vol.10 No.4, and 1988, Vol.11 No.8), and the omni principle is something that I have never found to…
Sidebar 1: Review Context
The Ohm loudspeakers were used with a pair of VTL 100W Compact monoblocks, connected with Monster M1 speaker cable, while the preamplifier was a combination of the Mod Squad Line Drive Deluxe AGT and Vendetta Research SCP2 phono preamp. Source components consisted of a Marantz CD-94 CD player used to drive a Sony DAS-R1 D/A converter, a 1975-vintage Revox A77 to play my own 15ips master tapes, and a Linn Linn Sondek/Ekos/Troika setup sitting on a Sound Organisation table to play LPs. Interconnect was Audioquest LiveWire Lapis.
The speakers sat either on…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
Fig.1 shows the way in which the CAM 16's impedance changes with frequency. The double hump in the bass is typical of a reflex design, the port tuning resonance reasonably well-damped and appearing to lie at 41Hz, the bottom note of the double- and Fender basses. With minima of 6 ohms or so in the lower midrange and mid-treble, the speaker should be a relatively easy load to drive. A slight bit of nonsense can be seen at 255Hz, this frequency the same as that of a very strong cabinet vibrational mode. Sensitivity was pretty much to spec at 88dB/W/m: this speaker…
One is a well-established reissue label, known the world over for its completist black boxes filled with beautifully remastered jazz recordings from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The other is a new label that records only new jazz, released in elaborate packages that include a poem and original artwork, not to mention transparent 180gm pressings, tying into the newly fashionable idea of a vinyl lifestyle.
In both cases, hope truly springs eternal. While the larger music business continues to be roiled by changing formats and the impact of streaming, the old and the new labels,…
Sidebar 3: Specifications
Description: Two-way, reflex-loaded, stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 0.75" polycarbonate-dome tweeter, 6.5" polypropylene-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: approximately 2kHz. Frequency response: 46Hz–20kHz ±4dB. Sensitivity: 89dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Amplifier requirements: 15–85W.
Dimensions: 17.25" H by 9" W by 11" D. Weight: 48 lbs/pair.
Price: $300/pair (1989); no longer available (2017). Approximate number of dealers: 250.
Manufacturer: Ohm Acoustics Corp., 76 Degraw Street, Brooklyn NY 11231. Tel: (800) 783-1553, (718) 422-…
"I have regrets about CDs. I mean, I wish to God they hadn't rushed into the market. I wish they'd waited till they could make 20- and 24-bit CDs before they hit the market. If I sit in a studio and flip back and forth between analog and 24-bit, you'd be hard put to tell the difference in most cases—24-bit is sublime."
Cuscuna thinks that perhaps the next logical, the most compact and convenient physical medium is the USB thumb drive, but admits that there's nothing sexy about them. "I remember when Universal was gonna be ahead of the curve, and there was some new thing they were going…
For anyone who wants to be up to date on all the audio products available in North America, Audio's Annual Equipment Directory is an indispensable source of information. (So is the publication you're reading now, of course.) The 1992 Directory (aka Audio's October issue) arrived when I was finishing up the review of the Acarian Alón IV (see February 1993, Vol.16 No.2) and about to start seriously listening to the Unity Audio Signature 1s. As I leafed through the issue, I wondered how fledgling loudspeaker manufacturers feel reading the section on loudspeakers. According to the Directory,…
The speakers also proved to be dynamic in the usual sense: They played loud, with little apparent strain. At what for me are very high levels (+100dB peaks, C-weighted, "fast" setting on the Radio Shack SPL meter), the Signature 1s lost some of their composure, with a curtailment of depth and the sound becoming generally harder. (There was no indication of clipping from the Bryston 7Bs' warning LEDs.) In normal listening, I never felt that the Signature 1s were approaching their dynamic limit, but the speakers may not be ideal for large rooms and/or those who feel that a really good speaker…
Sidebar 1: Revealingness vs Forgivingness
It's often said that audio design involves tradeoffs. But what differentiates good design tradeoffs from the indifferent and the bad? In my opinion, this has to do with the relationship between "revealingness" and "forgivingness."
By "revealingness" I mean the component's ability to pass on the information in the source material in complete, unexpurgated detail. Lewis Lipnick has used the expression "ruthlessly revealing" to describe a particular component that he felt had a lot of this characteristic. We all know components like that:…
Sidebar 2: Review System
Analog front end: Lingo'd Linn, Ittok, and AudioQuest AQ7000, replaced in the latter half of the review period by the new AQ7000nsx (footnote 1), which, believe it or not, is even better than the cartridge it supplants. Digital: McCormack Signature (footnote 2) CD player, and, for most of the listening, the same player acting as transport, feeding a PS Audio UltraLink via TARA Labs Digimaster coax. Late in the auditioning period, I had to return the McCormack Signature to its manufacturer, and so had to regress to using my old Philips CD-650 as transport. Don't…