Marketing is all about hyperbole and superlatives, but marketing in theaudioworld is distinctly egregious.
Chances are youve probably heard at leastsomemusic made with Genelec speakers.
The subject of todays review is theGenelec 8341A, part of the companys state-of-the-art The Ones series.
Theyre great at just about everything and do just about nothing wrong.
Its as close to textbook perfect as any speaker Ive measured.
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It starts with the speakers design.
Unlike most speakers, the 8314A also sounds nearly identical when oriented horizontally thanks to its coaxial design.
Pick whatever works best for your setup.
Genelec has built a reputation for making resilient speakers theyre intended for working professionals, after all.
Youll feel it when you attempt to lift them up.
Barring someone poking the exposed mid-woofer with a stick these speakers feel like theyll last forever.
Those of you whove been reading my speaker reviews (hi!)
know that Im all about speaker measurements.
My measurements of the 8341A show a speaker with nearly impeccable performance.
So this time around, Im combining my listening impressions with my interpretation of the measured data.
Although this standard was developed primarily for living-room speakers, it can be useful for studio monitors as well.
There are two key things that affect the sound you hear from a speaker.
There is the direct sound that travels in a line of sight from the speaker to your head.
You need good performance in both respects to have truly exceptional sound.
See the white and green lines above?
Those represent the direct sound.
The green line is the on-axis response and the white is the listening window.
Ideally, this line will look like a flattish line too, except tilted down by a few decibels.
These two lines already tell us that the speaker will have an extremely neutral tonality in most setups.
On most music, they will sound fantastically transparent.
Individual taste factors less into it than you might expect.
We can then assess the speakers soundstage performance by looking at its directivity.
This is essentially how the speakers soundchangesat different angles.
We want the reflected sound to closely match the direct sound.
If it doesnt, not only will tonality be affected, but the imaging will become muddy too.
Again, the 8341A is impeccable.
This line should generally be smoothly rising, without major peaks or dips.
Thats what we get.
The yellow dotted line, the horizontal ERDI, is only the horizontal component of the above.
The horizontal ERDI line is even smoother, basically guaranteeing the 8341A will have excellent imaging performance.
We can further break things down by looking at the exact measurements of the 8341A in 10-degree horizontal intervals.
The emphasis on horizontal performance doesnt mean the vertical performance doesnt matter at all.
Indeed, the 8341A goes the extra mile by having pretty much perfect vertical directivity too.
We can see the estimated reflections off your ceiling and floor closely match the rest of the data.
Most speakers are significantly compromised in this orientation.
Subjectively, the 8341As imaging performance is kind of glorious.
you’re able to pinpoint instruments in a track like nobodys business, but the soundstage isnttoonarrow.
The soundstage only slightly extended past the speakers themselves in my testing.
Its harder to measure and meaningfully interpret other aspects of sound like dynamics and distortion.
Everything just sounds correct.
Isnt that all we really want from our speakers?
Its the rare speaker that might really, truly let you hear music as the artist intended.
