Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

I installed a pair of the 1031As on 28" stands in my 16' by 20' main audio/video room, with the speakers and listening seat at the corners of an equilateral triangle. The rectangular cabinets were oriented vertically, placed symmetrically in relation to the room's side walls, and 4' from the back wall. The listener-to-loudspeaker distance was about 7', and the speakers were aimed straight ahead, as they'd been when I first heard them at Colorado Sound (and as they would be in most other studios). The surround channels went on 6' stands 7' behind me, near but not close to the room corners, and aimed at the diagonally opposite front speakers. The center channel went midway between the front pair, set upright on a low stand that put it right below the bottom of my 6½'-wide projection screen, and propped up at the front so as to aim at my ear height.

The two subwoofers were placed in locations that I've found yield the smoothest low-end frequency response when two subs are used: at ¼ and ¾ intervals across the space between the room's side walls. This helps to ensure that whatever standing-wave irregularities are excited by one woofer aren't excited by the other. For example, with a single subwoofer, I could never find a location that could eliminate a moderate, narrow response dip at 50Hz. With two placed asymmetrically and adjusted to similar output levels, the dip was gone.

The multichannel calibration was done using the Lexicon's built-in test signal and a RadioShack sound-pressure meter. The Genelecs' extensive equalization and level adjustments made it possible to get a wide variety of sounds from them, and it took several days of tweaking before I got just the right combination of midbass bloom, subwoofer/satellite blending, and low-frequency weight. Most subwoofer owners set their levels too high, presumably on the grounds that they paid a pretty penny for those things and they're damn well gonna hear them. But not only is excess bass muddy bass, it also overpowers the deeper bass below the woofer's resonant frequency; the system doesn't sound as if it goes as deep as it can.

Ideally, a subwoofer shouldn't reveal its presence in a system until something really deep comes along. The best way to achieve this delicate balance is to start out with the subwoofer(s) turned all the way off, then increase the level bit by bit while listening to a variety of material with deep bass in it.

But what material with deep bass? Music recordings vary all over the place in their amounts of low-frequency weight: from the wretched excesses of Telarc's bass drums and Dorian's pipe organs to the sparseness of RCAs and CBS/Sonys. The closest to dead-center-on bass that I've found are Classic Records' re-releases, and one of their best for subwoofer setup is the The Royal Ballet: Gala Performances (Ernest Ansermet, Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden, RCA Living Stereo Soria Series/Classic LDS-6065). Not only does it have lots of deep, musical bass activity, it also has frequent interludes of subway rumble that were probably too deep for Decca's early monitors to reveal. The goal here is to balance the subwoofer(s) so that double basses throb rather than rumble, the bass drum thuds rather than booms, and the subway is audible but not obtrusively so.

The Genelec subs had to be reduced by 1.5dB from measured level to produce subjectively proper balance. (Dual subwoofers should be set at the same volume level to begin with, but it will often be possible to get smoother response by tweaking the relative levels. In my case, setting the inside subwoofer 2dB higher than the one near the wall gave slightly smoother bass across the listening area.)

In Stereo
Out of the box, the Genelec speakers sounded raw, tizzy, and plastic—the classic signs of a system badly in need of break-in. I piped pink noise into them from a generator and Y-adapter, cranked the sound up to 75dB, set the Lexicon (footnote 3) to Party mode (which feeds the same signal to all upper-range channels), and spent a long day running errands. That evening, they were ready for serious listening.

After the Genelecs were broken-in, my first and lasting reaction to them was that reviewing them really had been a good idea. There was an intrinsic rightness about their sound that I haven't heard from any review system since the Tannoy 10-DMT II, which I reviewed in Vol.3 No.1 of Stereophile Guide to Home Theater (Spring 1997) and which, despite no longer being available, is still my reference speaker. From a nearfield listening distance of a little over 3', the Genelecs sounded almost shockingly real, with the kind of micro-detailing that is rarely heard outside of a live performance—barely perceptible finger squeaks, page turnings, valve clicks, and glottal sounds from vocals. This was detail of definitely high-end caliber. The Genelec has the best-sounding amplifier of any powered speaker I've heard, and delivered some of the most realistic, alive sound I've heard in my home.

Unfortunately, at a typical home-theater listening distance of 7', some of that magic was gone. Some detail was lost, and the high end became slightly hot, while the range below became (in my relatively dead room) a little laid-back and subtly blurred, as though the system was involving the room acoustics too much. Whether reproducing speaking voice or musical instruments, the Genelec stereo system did only moderately well on the "next-room test." Listening from the adjoining room, there was never any doubt that what I was hearing was reproduced. (This is a nasty test; very few modern consumer speakers can pass it. Thirty years ago, many could.)

The first (–2dB) notch of treble cut on the speakers tamed the HF rise but had no effect on the lower ranges, and none of the other tweaking adjustments had any effect on the darkening that I heard. Nevertheless, this wasn't severe enough to substantially damage instrumental timbres. Voices, brasses, and large-bodied instruments like double-basses and bassoons sounded the right size rather than, as is often the case, larger-than-life. (Our hearing naturally equates timbre with size: the darker, the larger.) But the loss of reach-out-and-touch-it realism was disappointing.

It was still easily possible for me to forget I was listening to loudspeakers and get wrapped up in the music. This is a strong plus for the Genelecs, because not many systems do that for me. Between my winter orchestra-recording activities and summer season tickets, I get to hear a lot of real acoustical music, so I'm picky as hell about accuracy. And I can assure readers who haven't experienced audio reality for a while that live music isn't always as lushly euphonic as most audiophile speakers make it sound. Much of it is harsh, shrill, ugly, and bristling with sharp little spikes, and a sound reproducer worthy of the name must be able to deliver those nasty qualities as well as the beautiful ones. From two channels, the Genelecs were easily in the ballpark.

One thing that sets pro speakers apart from most consumer systems is their ability to reproduce real-world volume levels. The Genelecs have immense dynamic range—they seem to compress things hardly at all, and a mere two of them easily produced more volume than I could take, although not entirely without strain. At levels above 95dB or so, the sound began to lose some of that effortless quality that characterizes a true fortissimo, and became instead a little steely-hard—not nearly as much so as most consumer systems, but audibly. Yet the overload lights rarely flickered red, suggesting that amplifier overload was not a factor.

Similarly, while bass quality was generally very good, with outstanding extension and pitch articulation, sustained, heavy bass (100dB and more) occasionally drove the subs over the edge, changing the musical bass to a generic low-frequency roar. I must add, though, that I never encountered bass that loud from any music recording, only from a very few film soundtracks.

Soundstaging was excellent—wide and deep—but it soon became evident that center fill was more solid and stable when the speakers were toed-in than when aimed straight ahead. With the speakers' axes crossing at about my nose, I could sit anywhere within a 5'-wide spread and still hear a balanced and coherent soundstage—although, unquestionably, it sounded best from dead center.

In Surround
Discrete-surround music recordings in Dolby Digital and DTS are just now beginning to appear in stores, but almost every stereo recording ever made has at least some ambient surround content that can be extracted by a suitable decoder, and many free-standing processors have one or more music modes that can do it. The Lexicon DC-1 THX version has several, some of which can actually reconstruct the original stereo surround field (footnote 4). I used both discrete and derived sources for my surround tests.

Since the center and surround speakers were already set up, converting the system to stereo was a simple matter of bypassing Genelec's crossovers, going into the Lexicon's Setup menu, and telling it the system now had a center channel and two small surround speakers that needed 80Hz crossovers. And firing up the full system opened up a new listening environment, as it always does. The most dramatic differences between surround and stereo were evident on discrete pop and rock recordings, where voices and instruments appeared from any or many directions, sometimes all at once. Derived surround could never approach these for effectiveness, but for classical material, the most startling change was the feeling of immersion in the hall. Recordings made in large performing spaces wrapped those spaces all the way around me, conveying a sense of being right in the hall instead of on the outside listening in. Front-soundstage imaging became a little less tight and precise from the front center "sweet spot" (which is also consistent with the real, live sound), but was much less dependent on listening position. Musical timbres were more rich and warm, and the overall sound seemed louder and more effortless than it had in stereo.

But on top of the system's already somewhat laid-back sound, the added warmth was a bit much. The sound was now definitely on the darkish side, and the system's bass EQ controls could not entirely correct for it. As a consequence, musical naturalness suffered. The startling realism and detail I had heard from the closer-to-nearfield conditions were pretty much gone, and the impression that the room was singing along with the speakers was unmistakable. (Genelec's own polar-response curve confirmed what I was hearing: The more off-axis the listener is, the more the whole range above about 600Hz is shelved-down.)

Genelec's Directivity Control Waveguide appears to work as specified. With all three front speakers upright, the soundstage was gorgeous—wide, deep, and integrated, with almost pinpoint image specificity and only a small amount of picket-fencing with changing lateral position. With the speakers on their sides (Genelec recommends tweeters out, woofers in) but with the original tweeter orientations, specificity was considerably degraded, and picket-fencing increased in severity to the point where instrumental positions hip-hopped as I moved my listening position from side to side. Rotating the tweeters according to Genelec's recommendation eliminated the instrument wander and restored the soundstaging and specificity almost to their original states. But imaging was still best with all the satellites oriented vertically, because that provides the best horizontal symmetry. Except for some home-theater situations, I can't see any reason why they shouldn't always be used standing up.

Wrapping it up
Heard as they were intended to be heard—from up close—the Genelec 1031A Studio Monitor is among the most drop-dead realistic-sounding speakers I've encountered. But Genelec appears to have made the same mistake many high-end speaker manufacturers make, and assumed that a design that sounds great in stereo will sound just as good in surround sound. That this is patently untrue becomes obvious when you compare stereo reproduction with the same signal blended (A+B) to mono. Switching from mono to exactly the same signal in stereo fleshes out the midbass and expands warmth and richness, even though spectral measurements reveal no change in frequency response. The change is all in the perception: more space equals more bass. Going from two channels to four (or more) in a surround configuration does the same thing, adding even more warmth to the already-enriched two-channel sound.

Unfortunately, this change in tonality with increased spatial information, which anyone who listens can readily confirm, is considered to be beyond cutting-edge, and has not yet been accepted by a scientific community that still denies that amplifiers that measure the same can sound different. The absence of measurements that could confirm the perceived relationship between space and midbass bass consigns the whole business to the realm of "anecdotal observation," along with reports of near-death experiences and UFO abductions.

So...would I recommend this system to a Stereophile reader? Not for typical listening at 7'. At around $13,000 for the whole system, the Genelec multichannel system is a bargain compared with what some not-too-suave two-channel systems cost, and its sound from a moderate distance has many of the romantic qualities audiophiles are looking for from stereo reproduction. But I still cling to the quaint notion that audio is at least as much about realism as about euphony, and as euphonic as these speakers sound in surround mode, they are not realistic-sounding.

This really bothers me, probably more than it should, because it is unprofessional to get involved with the products one reviews, but I'll make an exception in this case. Decades ago, I grew accustomed to reviewing speakers that sounded bad because they really were bad, and calling crap crap was just a part of my job. But Genelec's 1031A speakers are not crap; they are superb for the purpose for which they were intended—close-range listening. My problem with them in the context of this review is that they are being marketed for applications—far-field and multi-channel listening—for which they were not designed and are ill-suited.

It's obvious, though, why Genelec speakers are so popular with recording studios: Used as they are designed to be used, they are amazingly accurate devices. As someone who hears live, unamplified music several times a month, I can appreciate that.

I recommend Genelec's 1031A for close-in stereo use, but not for surround systems.

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Footnote 3: I used the DC-1 for both my stereo and multichannel listening because all my signal sources were digital and the DC-1 has the best D/A converter I had on hand.

Footnote 4: Ambience extraction depends on the fact that reverberation, being random in nature, is 50% anti-phase energy. It's extracted by subtracting the left front signal from the right front signal, and directing what's left to the rear speakers. This is only one signal, though; it's monophonic, lacking both directionality and spatiality. Lexicon and some others (like Citation and Meridian) then compare the surround signal with the same signal as contained in the left and right front channels; if it's stronger in one side than in the other, it is steered to that side in the surround speakers. The result can sound amazingly like discrete surround. In my live recordings, it's possible to pinpoint the locations of applauding audience members all the way across the back of the hall.