TOOLE WARMLY RECOMMENDED BY GENELEC'S MARTIKAINEN
When confronted with an uninformed reader on Genelec's forum pages in 2015, Ilpo Martikainen (1947-2017), Genelec's founder, recommended Toole's "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms" to replace confusion with insight:
Quote:
"We are most interested in how the speaker performs, i.e. sounds. This includes lots of listening tests as well. However, there is lot of research evidence of what makes the speaker sound good and how this correlates with measured performance, i.e. specs.
I warmly recommend Floyd Toole’s book “Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms”, it is an excellent representation of this subject".
Source: https://www.community.genelec.com/forum/-/message_boards/message/914379
I recommend reading all of Ilpo's response in the link above because it gives brief insights into the thinking at Genelec, how they combine science, listening tests and speaker production.
We have recently had discussions on the internet on who makes Genelec's drivers. According to internet rumors,
all of Genelec's drivers are made in China. Martikainen cast light on this issue thus:
"The midrange driver is designed and manufactured in house since 1988, as there was simply not good enough midrange drivers available. Its performance and design processes were reported in AES preprint 2755, including sensitivity, distortion, power handling and compression with high levels. The claim that midrange could not handle much power is wrong. The driver was tested up to 1 kW power to make sure it is mechanically stable and reliable. The reliability track record of this driver is extremely good. It was first used in the largest monitor 1035A and since then it is used in all 3-way models down to 1037B".
On the issue of hifi speakers vs pro audio, and production principles in general, he wrote:
"I may not be aware what these rules may be, but the 1238A is designed as a professional monitoring speaker, where requirements are more stringent than in most hi-fi speakers. For example, monitoring speaker shall be extremely neutral, linear, reliable, serviceable, manufactured with very tight tolerances between units and batches over the years. Any speaker of same model may be paired with any other sample, even made years apart. As the “sound” of the recording is adjusted by listening it with the monitoring speaker, the monitoring speaker must be most revealing. Actually the monitoring speaker has to be more revealing than anything else in the reproduction chain after that. This ensures that end users will not find any surprises".