Occasionally I see these claims that Genelecs have poor compression performance - the claim isn't that they clip, since that's easy to tell from the red clipping indicators. Rather, the claim is that the drivers compress, as with passive speakers, and/or the built-in protection is very conservative (as Genelec admits).
My recollection is that when someone made a claim to this effect about the 8351b's here in another thread, I went looking for Genelec compression measurements online, and all I could find were Erin's compression measurements for the 8331s, which are shown in the first post of this thread. Here they are again:
This shows that at 86dB, the 8331s do not compress. At 96dB, they do exhibit compression, although it's less than 0.5dB from about 63Hz upward. Based on these measurements, you do lose about 1 to 1.3dB of output (relative to most of the rest of the spectrum) from their f10 of 40Hz up to about 63Hz if you play them at 96dB.
When used with a subwoofer crossed at a typical 80Hz, it would appear the 8331s are fine compression-wise up to 96dB. I would say there is some possibility that the 0.25 to 0.4dB compression dip at 96dB in what appears to be the 120-275Hz range could potentially be detectable. (Above that range the 96dB compression appears to be truly neglible.) Even then, though, I would imagine it would be tough to detect given that human hearing tends to perceive more bass as volume increases.
And all of the above seems to be a worst-case scenario, as Erin indicated that when playing music (as opposed to doing sine wave sweeps) he was able to achieve 100dB SPL 3M away, and if they were compressing with music the way the above graph looks, Erin clearly would have heard that.
www.genelec.com
