Genesis 44 Speaker System Review

A surprising speaker, the Genesis 44. It certainly looks distinctive: the integral base of this two-way, floor-standing system tilts the cabinet back for best coverage of the listening area. If you don’t like the leaning-tower look, however, the support angle can be changed to make the cabinet vertical. Adding to the speaker’s unusual appearance are the broadly beveled front edges of the cabinet, which are angled back at 45 degrees in order to reduce diffraction effects that could alter the speaker’s dispersion pattern.

Despite the Genesis 44’s rakish bearing, unsnapping its beige cloth grille reveals an apparently unremarkable driver complement. Vertically aligned on the front panel (which, like the rest of the cabinet, is finished in walnut-grain vinyl veneer) are a 0.8-inch “hard dome” tweeter, a nominally 8-inch woofer, and a 10-inch passive-radiator cone to augment the lowest frequencies. The stiff, treated-fiber woofer cone provides a mechanical low-pass crossover action, and both low-frequency cones have compliant-edge surrounds to allow the large, linear cone excursions necessary for good bass output with low distortion. At 1,100 Hz there is a crossover to the ferro-fluid-cooled tweeter. The dome shape of the tweeter is described as “double inverted,” although there is nothing visible externally to explain this unusual nomenclature.

The speaker has no external level or balance adjustments. An amplifier power of at least 30 watts per channel is recommended to drive the Genesis 44’s nominal 6-ohm impedance. Insulated spring clips for wire connections are recessed into the rear of the cabinet, which measures 31-1/2 x 18 x 8-7/8 inches. Each speaker unit weighs 42 pounds. Although appearing laterally symmetrical, the speaker units are identified as “left” and “right.” Price: $700 per pair.

Lab Tests

The manufacturer suggests placing the Genesis 44 speakers a couple of feet from the wall, and their normal tilt to the rear makes this an obvious choice. We measured the room response from a pair of speakers located as recommended.

For quasi-anechoic FFT response measurements, we placed a single speaker cabinet well away from the room walls with the microphone 1 meter in front of the grille. Low-frequency response and distortion were measured at frequencies between 100 and 25 Hz with the microphone as close as possible to the driven cone (and again close to the passive cone). The drive level for the distortion test was 4 volts, the input required in the midrange to produce a 90-dB sound-pressure level at 1 meter from the front of the speaker.

The respective bass-response curves for the driven and passive cones were combined with due allowance for their relative areas, and the combined curve was spliced to the smoothed and averaged room-response curve, corrected at high frequencies for the known absorption properties of the room. The resulting composite curve was exceptionally uniform and smooth. Between 200 and 15,000 Hz, the variation was a mere ± 2 dB, making this one of the most nearly ideal loudspeaker room-response measurements we can recall making.

The high-frequency room-absorption correction lifted the curve between 10,000 Hz and 20.000 Hz by about 5 or 6 dB. The axial frequency response, measured with our IQS 401L spectrum analyzer, confirmed the reality of this effect. The FFT axial response was within 5 dB overall from 180 to 17.000 Hz (or to 20,000 Hz if the broad maximum between 17,000 Hz and 20,000 Hz was disregarded). The output dropped rapidly between 20,000 and 24,000 Hz. Response curves made on axis and 45 degrees off axis were very close up to 7,000 Hz, differing by only about 6 dB in the vicinity of 15,000 Hz. The phase characteristics of the Genesis 44 were excellent.

The power-handling ability of the speaker was measured with short low-duty-cycle tone bursts (typically 2 cycles on and 64 or 128 cycles off) at 100 and 1,000 Hz. The acoustic-output waveform from the speaker did not differ significantly from the electrical driving waveform for inputs up to 500 watts at either frequency (based on the actual 4-ohm impedance we had measured at these frequencies). We usually extend this measurement to 10,000 Hz, but apparently the small dome tweeter was not able to absorb the average input of several watts—its voice coil burned out. We hasten to point out, however, that this was hardly the fault of the speaker, since at the point when the tweeter burned out we were applying a burst amplitude of somewhere around 50 volts rms, which translates to about 350 watts!

Comments

Fortunately, we usually listen to a product at some length before testing it, so our testing mishap did not affect our listening evaluation of the Genesis 44. Within a few seconds of starting to listen to these speakers, it was evident that the Genesis 44 is not a “typical” two-way speaker. In fact, the sound we heard from the system transcended anything that might have been inferred from our measurement data.

From the response curves and distortion measurements, it would be natural to conclude that the Genesis 44 is a smooth, uncolored speaker with a very wide-range response and considerably above-average dispersion qualities. Well, it is certainly all of that, but it is much more besides. The Genesis 44’s created an unmistakable feeling of depth in many stereo programs that was simply lacking in the sound of other speakers with which we compared them. This was the sort of effect we might have expected to hear from speakers having unconventional radiation patterns designed to create such a spatial characteristic. Despite its unconventional appearance, however, in many respects, including price, the Genesis 44 is about as conventional a speaker as you are likely to find. It does have outstanding phase coherence and dispersion characteristics, but these are among the expected benefits of the basically two-way design with an apparently simple crossover system, the very small-diameter tweeter, and the beveled cabinet edges, which are known to reduce diffractions.

Whatever the reason(s), the Genesis 44 proved to be a system to which we could listen indefinitely without being reminded that we were listening to loudspeakers. There are relatively few speakers that we have been reluctant to return to the manufacturer after testing them. The Genesis 44 is one of that small group.

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