We weren’t able to find any test procedure which would yield results that any decent percentage of people here would consider trustworthy and meaningful in general.
The only exception was if the blind test was done by Harman — then the results would be trusted blindly as unquestionable fact. But an otherwise identical test, though done by an organization or person or any other name than Harman, becomes immediately suspect and unscientific
I don’t want to go through all the
significant time and effort to carefully perform a blind test, if just for my own satisfaction (because I’m already satisfied); I’m only interested in doing a blind test if it would actually contribute new data that others would find usable/interesting. So I’ve postponed doing any such test until at least a good number of people here can conclude on a testing procedure that would actually be capable of deciding on a winner in a meaningful way applicable to more listeners than just myself.
I’m satisfied enough with the sighted listening tests I’ve now done in three different rooms and with a wide range of music listened over many hours.
From my own subjective listening, the
TDLR of my impressions are: Both are amazing, but Revel Salon2’s are better at transporting a real acoustic/vocal (anything unamplified) music performance into your room, while the Genelec 8351B is better at the opposite — transporting you to the venue of an amplified-style or stage-style performance.
For stereo, the Genelec is better for “amplified” or stage style music, like rock, electronic, etc. and worse at reproducing the sound of a musical performance from real instruments in a room (or concert hall) in which you expect the music to surround you by reflecting off all surfaces.
In a multichannel setup (even if only with upmixing from stereo) I suspect a Genelec surround setup could be better in every respect than Revel since you could select at any time whether you want that “live” “energetic” “up front” “wall of sound” you get from more focused image and narrower dispersion, versus if you engage stereo upmixing you could also get the “vast” “expansive” “surround” effect that the Revel Salon2’s do amazingly well despite with just a stereo pair. But this is just a theory and I have not yet tested it.
Beyond these spatial/soundstage differences, the Genelec 8351B is probably better and audibly more perfect overall, but the Salon2 is still pretty amazingly perfect and has an almost magical ability to achieve very flat and consistent bass across multiple listening positions in rooms of all sizes. The Genelec, in contrast, like any other 8” woofer speaker (+single subwoofer, which is how I use it in my office) is confined to the laws of physics, so it hits a lot of room modes so is very hard to have bass sound really excellent in more than one or two listening positions. The Revel Salon2 (likely due to its 3x 8” woofers per tower) sounds a lot like 2-4 subwoofers in terms of consistency (and power capabilities) out of the box. So much so that I often don’t even need to EQ the bass much, if at all, and don’t really feel the need to supplement the Salon2’s with subwoofer(s). In fact, most of my attempts to integrate subs with the Salon2’s has ended up sounding subtly worse for music than just EQ’ing the Salon2’s.