Occasionally, however, something would upset the precious illusion and the 500s would call attention to themselves. I'll take a risk here and suggest that the culprit is the midrange baffle arrangement. Genesis touts the 500 as a dipole from the midrange up. Technically this may be so, but the midrange driver is mounted at the front of a short tunnel. Thus, it radiates freely to the front while its rear radiation passes through the chamber. Close listening reveals that the rear sound is decidedly lacking in the upper midrange as compared with the front. I suspect that, at the listening position, signals in that particular range have a spatial signature different from those in the rest of the spectrum. The effect was to fool my ears into sensing that the innocent tweeters were too assertive, but careful tweaking of the level controls revealed this not to be so. Consequently, the trick I so highly value—that of the speaker disappearing into the music—was not always achieved by the 500. Like Ivory soap, the Genesis 500 was only 99 44/100% pure.

Conclusions
The Genesis 500 loudspeaker is graceful and physically unobtrusive but performs superbly with all music, from the simple to the large and complex. In fact, its conservative physical form permits the listener to more easily forget its presence and become absorbed in the musical experience. Its bass reproduction was the most consistently musical and integrated of any speaker I have used to date. And the 500 was sufficiently tweakable to adapt to shifting room arrangements and subtly differing source components while remaining devastatingly revealing of these components. The only blemish is an infrequent quirk in treble imaging.

Since the sale of my long-term references, the Genesis 500 is the first speaker I've auditioned that I would dearly love to keep. Unfortunately, the admitted general utility of the self-powered woofers makes them inappropriate for my use in evaluating amplifiers. So, sadly, I must pass the Genesis 500s on to Santa Fe for testing, never to darken my doorstep again. You, fortunate reader, should feel no such constraint. Just remember to invite me over.