Speaker Systems

Thank you for another thorough and insightful review. We at Genesis are glad that Mr. Stone felt that the more affordable Genesis 7-Series did not suffer in comparison with his reference Genesis 6-series loudspeakers. We feel that our objective in developing the 7-series was met - to deliver absolute fidelity(tm) at a more affordable level.

Whether your readers prefer the multi-channel distributed bass setup preferred by Mr. Stone (and Genesis), or the setup preferred by Mr. Norton with all bass channeled to the subwoofers, we provide a paper on the setting up of distributed bass (downloadable from our website) to help you balance the LFE and primary bass levels. The Genesis 928 was designed to make it easy to distribute bass around the room.

We accept the conclusion both from Mr. Norton and Mr. Stone that first-class electronics are needed to drive the Genesis speakers. The reason we LC tune the crossover is to extract more bass than is normally possible out of a small cabinet with small drivers. This is done at the expense of drawing more power from the amplifier using a lower impedance. In the G7.1c, this feature can be switched off.

However, we would like to make the point that first-class does not equal megabuck expensive. We use a 7-channel amplifier that retails at $1,995 in our lab for development and testing, our dealers have made very successful installations using receivers, and Arnie uses an old Marantz receiver when watching movies with these G7.1c's in his bedroom!

Loudspeaker measurements are very hard to duplicate, and especially so when different measurement systems are used. Arnie Nudell and Bascom King have been measuring speaker systems for much longer than either of them would be comfortable to admitting. They have studied Tom Norton's measurements at length and have failed to understand what his graphs are supposed to represent. It is by a stretch of imagination that they find some correspondence with our own measurements.

Our own measurements show that on tweeter axis, with full clockwise rotation of the tweeter level control, the speaker measures from 500Hz to 20kHz plus or minus 2dB. This is well within the excellent range for any speaker.

No speaker responses are absolutely flat. If they were, listening to them would be less desirable than well-placed peaks and dips in the overall response. That is one of the ways that speaker designers voice their products.

Furthermore, we have found that measurement at 1m on axis does not correspond as well to the perceived response as measuring at 50 or 60 inches. It is like dropping three stones into water and looking to see how far away the ripples go before they seem to form a straight line. We have found that most speakers take 50 inches to 60 inches to be amalgamated in the far field.

We believe that if Tom Norton had used MLSSA (as we do), and measured our speaker at 50 inches, his results would have very closely corresponded to ours. Nevertheless, we would like to thank Ultimate AV magazine for a tremendous review.

Gary Leonard Koh
Managing Director President/CEO
Genesis Advanced Technologies, Inc