Genesis Advanced Technologies 2.2 manual The Technology, absolute fidelity, Design Philosophy

John William Strutt Lord Rayleigh (1842 – 1919)

absolute fidelity

The Technology

The Genesis 2.2 loudspeaker comprises four “towers”: two midrange/tweeter wings and two bass columns. Each tower is over 6 feet tall (183cm), and the cabinet is made of a vibration damping and resonance-control acrylic/composite sandwich material. The tweeters and midrange ribbon are mounted on a solid 1.5-inch slab of high-molecular weight cast acrylic.

The rationale for the four-tower system separating the woofers from the midrange/tweeters is to allow the placement of the high- frequency wings to optimize imaging and soundstage, and the placement of the woofer towers to optimize in-room bass response.

Design Philosophy

Nothing has changed in theoretical acoustics since Lord Rayleigh’s original book on acoustics published in 1877. There are still only two proper ways for a transducer to propagate sound in a room: a point source and a line source. Anything else, or everything in between, is a compromise.

In order for all frequencies of sound from the loudspeaker to reach the listener at exactly the same time, a coherent wave front is important - not just “time- alignment” of drivers. The ideal is either an infinitely small pulsating point or a pulsating line with a size on the order of the room dimension.

Obviously, a line-source is much easier to mechanize than the ideal point source. The line-source (if large enough), can approximate

the ideal, and in doing so, provide sufficient radiating area for dynamically and spatially realistic sound reproduction.

The Genesis 2.2 is a line-source that is 4 feet long (nearly the half the room’s entire height). A line source has no vertical dispersion at any frequency. Hence, there is no sound bouncing from either the

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