Genelec 8361A Review (Powered Monitor)

[Laserjock]

 

[Pdxwayne]

What people often don't know - because they haven't read the papers or my books - is that at the very outset of my research the key set of experiments were done in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a massive nationwide organization that was seeking to upgrade their monitors, large, medium and small for different circumstances. The goal was to find similar sounding, and timbrally neutral, loudspeakers for their needs. The listeners were a mixture of their professional recording engineers from across the nation and local audiophiles that I had sought out. I had earlier given up on professional musicians as critical listeners of sound quality - most of them pay more attention to the music, seeking "valid interpretations". Others have found the same thing. There were no "people off the street".
Toole, F. E. (1985). “Subjective measurements of loudspeaker sound quality and listener preferences”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 33. pp. 2-31.
Toole, F. E. (1986). “Loudspeaker measurements and their relationship to listener preferences”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 34, pt.1, pp. 227-235, pt. 2, pp. 323-348.
There were two important findings: pro engineers and audiophiles liked and disliked the same loudspeakers in double-blind, equal loudness comparison tests. Except for a sub-group of the engineers who had trouble delivering consistent ratings of loudspeakers when they heard them repeatedly in the randomized presentations. It turns out that these individuals had suffered significant hearing loss, which is an occupational hazard in pro audio. They were not hearing all of the sounds, good or bad, and therefore could not be as reliably analytical. Yet, they were creating recordings! How many like them are out there in the music and movie industries? A lot.
All of this was described in JAES publications in 1985-86, and is in my books.
The next phase was to see if the impressive agreement among listeners extended to "ordinary folks" - and, surprise, surprise, it did. The obvious question is: How could they possibly know what good sound sounded like? It turns out that everyone seems to be able to recognize aspects of reproduced sound that are not "natural". In particular, all listeners objected to persistent audible resonances - booms, honks, nasality, shrillness, etc. The absence of resonances in transducers and enclosures turns out to the fundamental requirement for a "neutral/accurate" loudspeaker. General spectral humps, dips and tilts are there of course, but they tend to be correctable with tone controls or simple equalizers. These are the principal variations in recordings and at the basis of "personal preference", but, that said, most listeners prefer smooth, flat direct sound (on-axis performance). Trained listeners are simply those practiced in the detection of resonances. They deliver the same sound quality ratings as others, but they do it quickly and more reliably.
Olive, S.E. (2003). “Difference in Performance and Preference of Trained versus Untrained Listeners in Loudspeaker Tests: A Case Study”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 51, pp. 806-825. Sean has found the same thing in headphone evaluations done with many, many listeners around the world, eliminating yet another suspected factor: national or cultural bias.
So, from this perspective the ideal loudspeaker is one that is fundamentally neutral, and this is something that we can determine with impressive precision from measurements alone (the spinorama being one example). With this as a starting point simple tone controls or equalizers can create whatever "sound" the listener personally prefers, with any recording (they vary). It is always possible to return to "neutral" to hear what was created for us to enjoy.
However, bear in mind that the quality and quantity (primarily extension) of low frequencies account for about 30% of one's overall assessment of sound quality. The room itself (with loudspeaker and listener locations) is the dominant factor below about 200 Hz. This is something that cannot be generalized - it is totally dependent on individual circumstances. There are ways to address this problem, as discussed in my books.
In reality, stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality we seek. Two channels are not enough, and ALL phantom images between the loudspeakers are corrupted by acoustical interference - each ear hears two sounds, one delayed. But humans are remarkably adaptable, and forgiving.

Curious, what monitors did Canadian Broadcasting Corporation end up selecting after your research?

 

[Pdxwayne]

I search for CBC and found this article:

ADAM Audio | CBC/Radio Canada uses ADAM S6X

Good things come to those who wait: It has taken a long time for the flagship room at CBC/Radio Canada to be finished. Zenon Schoepe has visited Montreal and reports in the May/June edition of resolution on the new facility: "Monitoring was a crucial concern and the team had gone to a lot of...

www.adam-audio.com

Quote:
“...Monitoring was a crucial concern and the team had gone to a lot of trouble to compare and audition different brands. ‘We blind tested our engineers and they all liked the sound of the ADAMs. It’s more natural,..."

More natural.....hmmm......

 

[Inner Space]

In reality, stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality we seek.

This is where we diverge. I would recast your sentence: stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality you seek. Not we. I want to hear exactly what stereo offers, which is exactly what I put on the tape, which is a somewhat-3D banner hanging between the speakers, with width, some depth, and a suggestion of height. To want more than that is like blaming a banana for not being an apple orchard. Can you accept that it isn't everyone's ideal to hear a blurred and smeared image through a roomful of reverberation noise? In fact, yes, I'm sure you can.

Thus my problem is that the readers of your research accept your quixotic desire as gospel, and hence automatically and unthinkingly disqualify any speaker not capable of satisfying it, thereby ignoring the fact that, e.g., wide and even dispersion is of no interest to folks who just want to listen to stereo in purpose-treated rooms, as opposed to those who want to lounge around a domestic living room amid some random degree of faux envelopment. Which in turn, and in error, ignores many excellent speakers.

All research is valuable and interesting - yours included, and perhaps especially - but research never ends, and one approach does not match all use cases. The situation is complex, and results from the field are not really extensive (and often contradictory, e.g. you -vs- Lokki on clarity -vs- envelopment) and it's frustrating (to me at least) that some people want to "close the case" without further openminded inquiry. I'm sure no scientist - including you - ever thinks the last word has been said, and there is no more to be discovered.

 

[richard12511]

https://tidal.com/browse/album/195710509 Track 3 (String Quartet No.15 in D Minor, K. 421: III. Menuetto - Trio. )
https://tidal.com/browse/track/42687812 Track 1 ("Air" from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major)

First track sounds a bit too bright on my Genelec, Revel and my JBL, though it's still very much enjoyable. On the HD800s, it's just too bright for my ears.

I'd be curious what it was mix/mastered with.

 

[Pearljam5000]

First track sounds a bit too bright on my Genelec, Revel and my JBL, though it's still very much enjoyable. On the HD800s, it's just too bright for my ears.

I'd be curious what it was mix/mastered with.

Do you hear stuff on the HD800s that you can't hear on your 8351B?
Thanks

 

[richard12511]

Room about 20x25. 9 ft ceilings. Speakers pulled it into room off of walls. Rugs, bookcases full of books, windows have drapes, stuffed furniture. No acoustical treatment, but there are a couple of tapestries on walls. It has been an excellent room for music making and listening.

I found the speakers very impressive for electronic music. The clarity, and depth of bass excellent. Bill Frisell never sounded better in my room. The price of the speakers is very fair for this kind of music, which I also like very much. The speakers just didn’t, in my experience, fare well on acoustic instruments, especially violin and piano. I know most of you think it is wrong to talk about speakers in terms of music instead of frequency response, but that is my experience. I also agree that many of my problems with the speaker are related to dispersion, but I also found the speaker bright and could not fix it with glm or judicious eq. Still, I stress that for electronic, pop, rock, etc, the speakers are likely amazing and quite a good value. i would guess the bass response cannot be beat at anywhere near this price. Also, I rarely listen to music loud, so the spl capabilities lost on me. I’m not saying these aren’t great speakers in many contexts.

Can you provide an in room measurement? Or just post your GLM graph. That would really help to diagnose what's going on. Could have an overall lack of bass or something like that(that's what it was for me). Also, pictures of the setup might help us to see something obvious. You say you have them out in the room. I actually recommend the closer to wall placement for the better overall balance.

One nice thing about a speaker like an 8361, or any super accurate speaker(Revel, Mesanovic, D&D) is that it simply reveals the music exactly as it is on the recording. If I violin doesn't sound like a violin over an 8361, that just means that whatever is on the recording doesn't sound like a violin. Dr. Toole's research shows us that super neutral speakers like these will sound better on average(for all types of music, including classical), but the circle of confusion is still a real problem, and a non-neutral classical recording played back via a neutral loudspeaker will still sound non-neutral. Individual tracks or individual subjective preference is never going to be perfectly predictable. Overall(on average), though, these speakers(and other neutral speakers) sound great with classical music, and my own personal impressions definitely align with that average.

 

[richard12511]

Do you hear stuff on the HD800s that you can't hear on your 8351B?
Thanks

Yes. the HD800s are great for that. Surprisingly, my JTR 212RTs can actually rival them in that regard. Quite a few times, I heard some nasty sounding distortion, and I thought maybe the JTRs were damaged. It would scare me until I could queue up the song on another system. Turns out a super high ratio of direct to reflected sound is just fantastic at highlighting small amounts of distortion in the recording .

 

[A Surfer]

With any decent headphone you will always hear more detail than you do when listening to speakers but that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. With headphones the speakers are literally suspended right against the ear canal opening.

 

[Pearljam5000]

With any decent headphone you will always hear more detail than you do when listening to speakers but that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. With headphones the speakers are literally suspended right against the ear canal opening.

After owning the HD800 it's hard listening to anything less detailed than them.

 

[A Surfer]

After owning the HD800 it's hard listening to anything less detailed than them.

I hear you. I owned the HD800S and loved it.

 

[richard12511]

After owning the HD800 it's hard listening to anything less detailed than them.

HD800 is still my favorite headphone that I've heard(haven't heard the DC stealth), mainly for the soundstage and detail retrieval. I do find it a bit too bright without EQ.

 

[YSC]

What people often don't know - because they haven't read the papers or my books - is that at the very outset of my research the key set of experiments were done in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a massive nationwide organization that was seeking to upgrade their monitors, large, medium and small for different circumstances. The goal was to find similar sounding, and timbrally neutral, loudspeakers for their needs. The listeners were a mixture of their professional recording engineers from across the nation and local audiophiles that I had sought out. I had earlier given up on professional musicians as critical listeners of sound quality - most of them pay more attention to the music, seeking "valid interpretations". Others have found the same thing. There were no "people off the street".
Toole, F. E. (1985). “Subjective measurements of loudspeaker sound quality and listener preferences”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 33. pp. 2-31.
Toole, F. E. (1986). “Loudspeaker measurements and their relationship to listener preferences”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 34, pt.1, pp. 227-235, pt. 2, pp. 323-348.
There were two important findings: pro engineers and audiophiles liked and disliked the same loudspeakers in double-blind, equal loudness comparison tests. Except for a sub-group of the engineers who had trouble delivering consistent ratings of loudspeakers when they heard them repeatedly in the randomized presentations. It turns out that these individuals had suffered significant hearing loss, which is an occupational hazard in pro audio. They were not hearing all of the sounds, good or bad, and therefore could not be as reliably analytical. Yet, they were creating recordings! How many like them are out there in the music and movie industries? A lot.
All of this was described in JAES publications in 1985-86, and is in my books.
The next phase was to see if the impressive agreement among listeners extended to "ordinary folks" - and, surprise, surprise, it did. The obvious question is: How could they possibly know what good sound sounded like? It turns out that everyone seems to be able to recognize aspects of reproduced sound that are not "natural". In particular, all listeners objected to persistent audible resonances - booms, honks, nasality, shrillness, etc. The absence of resonances in transducers and enclosures turns out to the fundamental requirement for a "neutral/accurate" loudspeaker. General spectral humps, dips and tilts are there of course, but they tend to be correctable with tone controls or simple equalizers. These are the principal variations in recordings and at the basis of "personal preference", but, that said, most listeners prefer smooth, flat direct sound (on-axis performance). Trained listeners are simply those practiced in the detection of resonances. They deliver the same sound quality ratings as others, but they do it quickly and more reliably.
Olive, S.E. (2003). “Difference in Performance and Preference of Trained versus Untrained Listeners in Loudspeaker Tests: A Case Study”, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 51, pp. 806-825. Sean has found the same thing in headphone evaluations done with many, many listeners around the world, eliminating yet another suspected factor: national or cultural bias.
So, from this perspective the ideal loudspeaker is one that is fundamentally neutral, and this is something that we can determine with impressive precision from measurements alone (the spinorama being one example). With this as a starting point simple tone controls or equalizers can create whatever "sound" the listener personally prefers, with any recording (they vary). It is always possible to return to "neutral" to hear what was created for us to enjoy.
However, bear in mind that the quality and quantity (primarily extension) of low frequencies account for about 30% of one's overall assessment of sound quality. The room itself (with loudspeaker and listener locations) is the dominant factor below about 200 Hz. This is something that cannot be generalized - it is totally dependent on individual circumstances. There are ways to address this problem, as discussed in my books.
In reality, stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality we seek. Two channels are not enough, and ALL phantom images between the loudspeakers are corrupted by acoustical interference - each ear hears two sounds, one delayed. But humans are remarkably adaptable, and forgiving.

I didn't expect you to be here and reply in such details.

Too bad I am not an audio engineer and can't participate, I think the preference is really well summarized, somehow I sometimes wonders it's the room mode cancellations coincidentally falls in the region where one's preferred/ favorite band is located in a big trough and thus makes that "This sounded off" impression.

For the forgiving part, I still remember can't discern how bad a earbud with MP3 player on the go was and enjoyed pop music back then

 

[dshreter]

This is where we diverge. I would recast your sentence: stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality you seek. Not we. I want to hear exactly what stereo offers, which is exactly what I put on the tape, which is a somewhat-3D banner hanging between the speakers, with width, some depth, and a suggestion of height. To want more than that is like blaming a banana for not being an apple orchard. Can you accept that it isn't everyone's ideal to hear a blurred and smeared image through a roomful of reverberation noise? In fact, yes, I'm sure you can.

Thus my problem is that the readers of your research accept your quixotic desire as gospel, and hence automatically and unthinkingly disqualify any speaker not capable of satisfying it, thereby ignoring the fact that, e.g., wide and even dispersion is of no interest to folks who just want to listen to stereo in purpose-treated rooms, as opposed to those who want to lounge around a domestic living room amid some random degree of faux envelopment. Which in turn, and in error, ignores many excellent speakers.

All research is valuable and interesting - yours included, and perhaps especially - but research never ends, and one approach does not match all use cases. The situation is complex, and results from the field are not really extensive (and often contradictory, e.g. you -vs- Lokki on clarity -vs- envelopment) and it's frustrating (to me at least) that some people want to "close the case" without further openminded inquiry. I'm sure no scientist - including you - ever thinks the last word has been said, and there is no more to be discovered.

I would imagine he is saying that stereo is an impediment to the goal of creating a realistic reconstruction of an audio environment. Once a recording has been made in stereo, that compromise has already been made.

Putting aside the practical matters of cost and space considerations, are you fundamentally against more dimensions in recording and playback? To me there’s a clear difference between the conceptual goal of audio systems and what the most makes sense due to practical considerations, and it’s the practical reasons that have made stereo so popular.

 

[Inner Space]

Putting aside the practical matters of cost and space considerations, are you fundamentally against more dimensions in recording and playback? To me there’s a clear difference between the conceptual goal of audio systems and what the most makes sense due to practical considerations, and it’s the practical reasons that have made stereo so popular.

No, I'm all in favor of as many channels I can get, and have heard a lot of great stuff, and eventually learned how to mix it pretty well. But convincing results depend on fantastically complex and specific installations. At the moment, surely two-channel is about the max impracticality most of the market can tolerate. Hopefully the migration toward soundbars might be reversed with really ingenious and discreet wireless multichannel systems, but that feels a few generations away, and will they be nursed that long? The market might prove satisfied with today's surround algorithms out of pod speakers. I know plenty of civilians who are.

All that said, most of everything is stereo, and it is what it is, and I like it, and I find the desire to "improve" it very weird, especially by degrading it in the process. It feels like those old ads in the back of comics, along with the X-ray specs: "Make Stereo Bigger!"

 

[turnip_up]

Stereo is obviously very flawed though? The Haas effect, for example. Stray a small amount from the sweet spot, and the phantom centre entirely collapses as our ears preference the side with the earliest time of arrival. In some spaces, like movie theatres, you only need to move a few centimetres from the centreline of the theatre to suddenly experience a stereo film almost entirely in mono, emanating from one side of the screen.

 

[thewas]

After owning the HD800 it's hard listening to anything less detailed than them.

Do you use the HD800 without EQ?

 

[Pearljam5000]

Do you use the HD800 without EQ?

I don't like EQing in general

 

[thewas]

I don't like EQing in general

If you like the HD800 sound without EQ and don't like using EQ I am not sure the neutral loudspeakers you are looking are something that you will enjoy:

Also please keep in mind that for a good/neutral loudspeaker experience EQ is mandatory in the modal region, especially in small listening rooms like your current one.

 

[807Recordings]

This is where we diverge. I would recast your sentence: stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality you seek. Not we. I want to hear exactly what stereo offers, which is exactly what I put on the tape, which is a somewhat-3D banner hanging between the speakers, with width, some depth, and a suggestion of height. To want more than that is like blaming a banana for not being an apple orchard. Can you accept that it isn't everyone's ideal to hear a blurred and smeared image through a roomful of reverberation noise? In fact, yes, I'm sure you can.

Thus my problem is that the readers of your research accept your quixotic desire as gospel, and hence automatically and unthinkingly disqualify any speaker not capable of satisfying it, thereby ignoring the fact that, e.g., wide and even dispersion is of no interest to folks who just want to listen to stereo in purpose-treated rooms, as opposed to those who want to lounge around a domestic living room amid some random degree of faux envelopment. Which in turn, and in error, ignores many excellent speakers.

All research is valuable and interesting - yours included, and perhaps especially - but research never ends, and one approach does not match all use cases. The situation is complex, and results from the field are not really extensive (and often contradictory, e.g. you -vs- Lokki on clarity -vs- envelopment) and it's frustrating (to me at least) that some people want to "close the case" without further openminded inquiry. I'm sure no scientist - including you - ever thinks the last word has been said, and there is no more to be discovered.

I mean this with due respect but it seems you do not understand the basics of the science at work here and the fundamental question Dr. Toole was working to achieve. The goal was to find a true tool to find accurate monitors regardless of peoples preferences. In the research which is based on science it came back to the understanding using mono was more accurate. No one is suggesting to work on music you can not use more than one channel of audio and that this is important but the fact still remains the more accurate a monitor is the more likely you are to achieve the results you wish.

Can the science be furthered? Perhaps, and I suspect and I suspect the testing tools also. Look at the Klippel for example which was not available before, people become more aware of their room acoustics, etc.