Genesis Technologies 500 loudspeaker
By Kalman Rubinson   •   May, 1999 In Stereophile's "Recommended Components," most full-range Class A speakers—and even some in Class B—are behemoths. Some are tall, some are wide, some are deep, and some are just plain big. Most of us would find such no-compromise devices physically imposing and visually distracting in our listening rooms. Putting aside the infamous "Spousal Acceptance Factor," how can you ignore such speakers' presence and concentrate on the music?

Genesis makes some very large systems, with midrange and treble drivers arranged on large panels and, usually, separate bass cabinets. These designs demand extremely large rooms lest they overwhelm the space visually and sonically. Genesis' APM models, seemingly intended for home-theater applications, have their upper drivers on a vertical column attached to a bass base. These are tall as well as deep; I can't imagine them being ignored in most domestic spaces.

All alone is the 500, a unique (for Genesis) floorstanding enclosure with the appearance of a minimonitor stacked on a small pedestal. At first glance, this design looks so much like another clone of the Wilson WATT/Puppy that I originally mistook its predecessor, the Genesis 5, for a Wilson at a WCES demo. (The Genesis 500 looks just like the Genesis 5, but the earlier model had a midrange dome and four woofers compared to the 500's titanium cone and three woofers.) The high-ceilinged room was about 25' by 60', and, aided by the host's Audio Research electronics, these two diminutive obelisks were filling it with glorious sound. But all confusion with the Wilson WATT/Puppy vanished once I'd heard the Genesis' profoundly powerful bass shaking that larger-than-living-room space. This was something beyond my expectations.

Like that of the Artemis EOS system I reviewed in the October 1997 Stereophile, the Genesis 500's midrange/treble enclosure is a truncated, tapered, four-sided prism with radiused edges, and the drivers contained therein are nearly full-range. This means that the important frequencies for delineation of musical detail and spatial cues interact minimally with the cabinet because of its narrow width and lack of sharp borders. The box appears to simply sit on a supporting woofer enclosure that provides bass extension and, lest we forget, a suitable pedestal for the upper enclosure. In actuality, the Genesis 500's two apparent enclosures are actually of a piece. Unlike the EOS's Falstaffian bass module, the Genesis 500's lower portion is svelte, particularly when measured against the bass wavelengths involved.