Genesis I.C.E 201 owner manual The Technology, a b s o l u t e f i d e l i t y, Design Philosophy

John William Strutt Lord Rayleigh (1842 – 1919)

a b s o l u t e f i d e l i t y

The Technology

The Genesis 201 loudspeaker comprises four “towers”: two midrange/tweeter panels and two bass towers. Each tower is 6 feet tall (183cm), and the cabinet is made of a vibration damping and resonance-control acrylic composite sandwich material.

The rationale for the four-tower system separating the woofers from the midrange/tweeters is to allow the placement of the midrange/tweeter panels to optimize 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 201 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 floor or the ceiling. No deleterious interference from these surfaces is created (as in virtually all other kinds of speakers).

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