Company Address: 164 Railroad Ave., Minturn, Colo. 81645; 970/827-9515.
by BASCOM H. KING
When I first heard the Genesis Vs, a year or two ago, I was enormously impressed with their sonic realism. Although they cost $14,500 per pair, including a servo bass amp, the Vs fall right in the middle of the Genesis Technologies loudspeaker line, all of whose woofers use accelerometer feedback. The Vs are of a more manageable size and weight than the models above them in the line and do not use the long ribbon midrange drivers found in the more expensive and larger Genesis models.
The Genesis V, which has four woofers, a mid/bass coupler, a dome midrange, and two tweeters, is a di pole radiator over most of its frequency range. To accomplish this, one tweeter, with its polarity inverted, is mounted on the cabinet's rear, while the 3-inch midrange and 6-inch coupler vent to the rear.
Two woofers also fire to the rear but (unlike the second tweeter) are in phase with the front drivers.
The four 8-inch woofers, which handle frequencies from 16 to about 90 Hz, have composite cones made from two layers of aluminum with a damping layer in between; their total cone area roughly equals that of two 12-inch woofers. The enclosure is divided into identical sections for each of the woofers, and all four woofers are driven in parallel by a servo amplifier, which is rated at 400 watts per channel.
The servo sys tem uses feed back from an accelerometer mounted on the top front woofer's voice-coil former. The amp com pares the signal from its front end (which has passed through low- and high-pass filters and some phase rotation) to the feedback signal and adjusts the amplifier's output until the front end's signal and the feed back signal match. Because the other three woofers are closely matched to the woofer that has the accelerometer, they all produce the same acoustic waveform in response to the processed input signal.
Besides the four woofers, the cabinet's rectangular base section holds the aluminum-cone, 6-inch mid/bass coupler, which handles frequencies from about 90 to 500 Hz. Just above the mid/bass coupler, at the bottom of the enclosure's truncated pyramid top section, is a 3-inch midrange with a titanium/silicon carbide dome; it covers the frequencies from 500 Hz to 3.6 kHz. Located above this driver is the front tweeter, which has a circular ribbon diaphragm and handles frequencies from 3.6 kHz all the way up to 40 kHz.
Genesis says that the V's drivers are operated well within their piston range; any breakup modes outside a driver's operating range are strongly attenuated by the crossover's filters.
The drivers are all custom-made for Genesis-no off-the-shelf or modified stock drivers here! Connections and controls are grouped at the bottom rear of each speaker system. The controls include a three-position midrange level switch and a variable tweeter level control. The Genesis V is necessarily biamped, since frequencies below 90 Hz come from the servo amp via a Neutrik high-current connector that also carries feedback to the amp.
But binding-post terminals are pro vided for bi-wiring the rest of the system, with a toggle switch selecting single- or bi-wired operation; the latter switch position splits the mid/bass coupler from the midrange and tweeters.
The two pairs of dual binding posts, which accommodate large spade lugs or heavy-gauge wire, are the finest I've seen. What's truly elegant about them is that the collars you tighten don't bear directly on the wires-instead, they press against a clamping bar that does not rotate. This lets you make exception ally tight connections with no fear that wire strands will squirm off the post as you tighten.
The servo bass amplifier's front panel carries a digital display but no controls. It's operated only by a re mote (which also can be used with other Genesis servo bass systems and the company's Digital Lens jitter-reduction device); the amp's display shows what function has been selected and what value you've selected for it. Up/down buttons on the remote are used to alter bass level, low-pass crossover frequency, and phase; single buttons control power on/off and the frequency of the high-pass (low cut) filter. This frequency increases for each push of the button until it reaches its maxi mum; with the next push, the filter drops to its minimum frequency.
The amplifier's IEC line-cord socket, line fuse, heat sinks, and input and output connectors are on its rear panel. High-quality RCA and XLR connectors are provided for unbalanced and balanced inputs. Power and feedback connections to the woofers are made via the same type of Neutrik connectors used on the speaker cabinet.
On to the sonic experience of the Genesis Vs. You don't just plunk down speakers of this caliber, hook them up, and get audio nirvana. First, you have to break the speakers in, position them, and try them with different amplifiers and various interconnect and speaker cables. This is an iterative process that finally gets you the best sound these speakers can deliver in your room and with your ancillary equipment.
I first positioned the Genesis speakers where my regular speakers usually sit. Next, I started assessing the Genesis V's sound with the various amplifiers I had on hand, which gave me a chance to break the speakers in at the same time. The amps included a Crown Macro Reference, Quicksilver M135s, a Spectron 1KW, and a pair of Sonic Frontiers Power 3s. I quickly found that these speakers are fussy, or revealing, about the amplifiers they're used with and that the Spectron and Sonic Frontiers amps sounded best with the Vs. And I initially had some trouble finding the best settings for the Genesis system's servo bass amplifier, getting too much mid-bass and not enough low bass.
By the time I'd done all this, I was getting familiar with the speakers, and they were beginning to get broken in; it was time to start experimenting with their placement. I moved the Vs out into the room more and got better spatial characteristics and more correct tonality. Moving them closer together improved the spatiality, imaging, and timbre even more. By this point, I'd found which amps sounded best with the Genesis Vs and where the speakers would sound best in my room. But I still heard some high-frequency edginess, so I decided to see what effect changing the cables might have.
The listening setup I had been using to this point included a Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 CD transport feeding a Genesis Digital Lens jitter reducer. I used the Lens to feed Sonic Frontiers SFD-2 MKII and Classé Audio DAC-1 D/A converters. I used AES/EBU balanced connections in and out of the Lens, through cables I'd made up from Gepco International's Digi-Audwire. I also used Digi-Audwire for the balanced connections between the D/A converter and my tube line driver preamp. For these interconnects, I was using 2-foot pieces of the Digi-Audwire.
The preamp's balanced outputs were connected to the Genesis V's servo bass amplifier input via an undistinguished pair of 2-meter cables; the preamp's unbalanced outputs drove the power amplifier that fed the Genesis V's upper drivers, via 9-foot interconnects from Music and Sound (MAS) that I have been using for some time. When I listened to sources other than CD, I used a Spectron or Pass Laboratories Aleph-P preamp in place of the line driver. The power amp was connected to the Genesis Vs through a 6-foot pair of Cardas Hexlink that I've used for quite a while.
At about this point, I started to think about changing digital interconnects in hopes of ameliorating the high-frequency edginess I was hearing. I first tried some digital interconnects from Audient Technologies. When I originally used these cables, while listening with B&W 801s, I had not particularly liked them; they made the system sound edgier and less real. But this may have been because I had not yet broken these cables in. When I tried one between the output of the Digital Lens and the D/A converter while listening with the Genesis speakers, the presentation became very noticeably more musical. Yet some irritation still remained. Arnie Nudell of Genesis suggested I try Illuminati DX-50 AES/EBU cables from Kimber Kable; when I put in a pair, things really started to fall into place.
Now the sound was amazingly good. Depth, dimension, and space were better than I had ever heard, and the level of musical believability was at an all-time high.
With these cables, all of the power amps sounded more musically acceptable to me, though they still sorted out in the same order as before. (Interestingly, when I put some Russian Svetlana 6550C output tubes into the Quicksilvers, they began to sound more like the Sonic Frontiers Power 3s, which use those tubes.) I got a further improvement by substituting new interconnects and cables from MIT and Transparent Audio. Putting an Audio Research LS22 balanced line preamp into the system made it better yet (it's the best preamp I have heard in my system to date).
So what do the Genesis Vs sound like after all this tweaking? In a word; wow! Imaging is very specific, soundstaging is wide and deep, frequency response is very smooth, instruments sound like they are supposed to, transient detail is amazing, dynamics are startling, and bass quality, quantity, rhythm, and pace are outstanding. The space and air around instruments are superb. Most important, with appropriate recordings it sounds as if you have a window into the space where the performers are. You are there or they are here, however you prefer to look at it.
This has been an exciting adventure into state-of-the-art audio for me. I finally achieved sound so musically satisfying and realistic that I'm going to have a hard time accepting anything less. Communication with the music can get to such a satisfying-sometimes overwhelming-level with this kind of reproduction! If I hadn't appreciated the importance of good cables in achieving overall realism, I wouldn't have gotten to the level that I did with the Genesis Vs. But the speakers themselves de serve most of the credit. For one thing, they act like a magnifying glass that throws these cable differences into sharper relief. The Genesis Vs are truly state of the art. Try to hear a pair at a dealer who knows how to demonstrate their full potential.
[based on review from Audio magazine, Feb. 1997]
Also see:
Genesis Model 210 Speaker (Sept. 1983)
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