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Genelec 8361A Review (Powered Monitor)

Rate this speaker:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 6 0.9%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 4 0.6%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 28 4.1%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 638 94.4%

  • Total voters
    676

Inner Space

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I think one difficulty here is that you need to propose some logical explanation for how "resolution and realism" are based on something other than a speaker's tonality (frequency response), dispersion characteristics/directivity, and distortion performance.
We need to ask if listening in stereo with two speakers reveals issues not found by testing a single speaker in mono. Cabinet talk (not measured here) is not apparent in mono but can be destructive in stereo. Mismatched FR is by definition not apparent in mono and can be a problem in stereo. Could either affect resolution and realism?

My approach, based on numerous reports from people I know and trust about some kind of "vagueness" in the 8361's bass, would be to check the waveguide for disturbances from the woofers slamming their output into the back of it. I wouldn't be surprised to find nothing, but equally wouldn't be surprised to find something.

I don't want to re-open the debate about mono-only testing, which is fine as far as it goes, but it needs a couple of extra steps to predict performance in stereo.
 

Purité Audio

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Many who grew up with the ‘sound’ of vinyl found digital too strident, if you are used to the colouration of traditional loudspeakers you may find transparent loudspeakers not to your taste.
Imagine though if difgital had come first.and then someone proposed vinyl as an ‘improvement’.
Stick with the speakers you enjoy.
Keith
 

Pdxwayne

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Life is complicated. Imagine deciding what wine to drink based on chemical analysis formulated by someone trying to sell wine and ignoring your own taste or the taste of experts who have spent their lives learning what good wine is.

I had these speakers in my room for about 2 weeks. I know they measure well. I also know I did not like them on most classical music recordings, especially strings And piano. Apparently I’m not alone in that. Who here has actually listened to acoustic (including violin and piano) music on theses speakers?

Maybe the problem is that the recordings we have of classical music are bright and too close and the speakers were just revealing that. But those are the recordings we have. Should I have put on the hair shirt and suffered with the speakers because the measurements of the day tell me they must be great? The speakers are hugely impressive (crystal clear with excellent bass), but I’m happy to be rid of them. Does evaluating speakers by actually listening to music mean so little here that spinorama trumps experience? I’ll have a bottle of that 63 Lafite please. You guys can drink the kool-aid.
Would you please tell me how you connect your source to the speakers? How do you control volume?
 

bo_knows

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You can start by reading the JAES papers from the Harman group, specifically any of the studies involving human subjects and blind listening.

We all recognize the existence of bias when listening. Thing is, when listening to transducers, the actual audible difference are large, relative to the contribution of internal bias. It's different from listening to SOTA devices, like DACS, where the actual audible differences are miniscule or non-existence. I could understand why you might want to disregard sighted listening tests when it comes to SOTA electronics. But that does not necessarily carry over to speakers and headphones.


That's your business.
The ability of measurements to explain differences in sound quality perceptions of speakers is good but not perfect - and that's with computerized analysis. The ability of an ASR member to eyeball a series of speaker measurements and predict how it will sound - probably "just okay." This is why I want to hear about the subjective impressions of others. When multiple individuals independently express the same listening observation, it's very possible that it's true.
[/QUOTE]
Let's take your point a little further.
Not in one of the videos of speaker manufacturers (B&W, KEF, Focal) did I see engineers being blindfolded (maybe they are not doing it for the purpose of the video that will be used for pubic marketing) or discuss any methodologies on how they are conducting the blind or double-blind tests. They speak of how important measurements are and they are conducting the listening test usually as a group (KEF). B&W engineer speaks in their marketing video about how he made the changes to the driver and goes immediately to the listening room to seek any improvements to the sound. So how he can be confident that the newly made changes are audible without BT or DBT? I could be wrong about this and if I'm, please provide the video or documents where they are doing it differently. How many of us will go to the dealer and do BT and DBT on speakers that we are interested in? Most likely we will listen to the speakers and decide if we like and enjoy the sound we are hearing (after reading some kind of report or review that shows the measurements). This is most likely (I'm making an assumption here) different when professionals are shopping for studio monitors where they are using them as a tool.
 
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preload

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I think one difficulty here is that you need to propose some logical explanation for how "resolution and realism" are based on something other than a speaker's tonality (frequency response), dispersion characteristics/directivity, and distortion performance.
Perhaps dig a little deeper and ask the next question. What exactly does the existing research say about "frequency response?" And that's frequency response at what level of smoothing (1/20th oct? 1/3 oct? no smoothing?)? And under what conditions (anechoic vs your living room, etc.)? How do you weigh the contributions of the different off-axis measurements? What about the slope of the FR plot? Is -1.3 degrees ideal? Can you eyeball a curve yourself, extrapolate the linear regression (in your head), and determine the slope to 1/10-degree accuracy (or even 1 degree accuracy)? You can't (because you're human and not a computer)?

Well, how pray tell, can you eyeball a spinorama and tell me how it will sound (let alone try to do this based on only 1 or 2 charts from a spinorama, like some people are fond of doing)?

As for the "group think here" not fully understanding Harman's research, that might be true of many of us - including you - but Floyd Toole himself has posted here quite recently explaining what the research found and didn't find, and how it did so, and has effectively debunked many of the claims made about the limitations of that research.
Am I a Harman research scholar? Nope, nor do I need to be. But what I have done was read the primary literature (the original papers) myself, thought about them critically, and attempted to correlate the learnings to real life. I put my money where my mouth was and spent over $20,000 purchasing audio products to correlate some of this learning in pursuit of this hobby. And a lot of the Harman research has been absolutely correct. But the way some people interpret it here is just wrong - in research, the term is that it gets "overgeneralized" or misapplied.

People seem to think that research findings are black and white. They usually aren't. Much of the listening preference research has been based on correlations. That means you can say things like "listeners tend to prefer" or "XYZ characteristic explains ___% of the variation in listener preferences." But this research doesn't allow you to say "all listeners should prefer XYZ" or "listeners that don't prefer XYZ speakers are idiots and should have their hearing checked."


That said, I certainly agree with you that different people have different preferences - it's a big world with lots of people so yes, of course. But the Harman research showed that for the most part people's preferences are surprisingly consistent, across geography/culture, age range, and listening expertise or lack thereof.
[/QUOTE]
That's semantics. Harman research actually showed that there is quite a bit of variability in the quantity of bass and treble preferred across different ages, genders, listening experience, and countries of residence. The official Harman interpretation of that (for obvious reasons, because it translates directly into an engineering goal) is that: "there is a single average preference curve across all humans, we just need to let end users adjust bass and treble quantities to their preference." And that's one valid way of looking at it when you have bass/treble controls. But reading in between the lines, it opens the question of: if there is human variation in bass/treble quantities, certainly there must be human variation in preference of other audible characteristics.


But again, the main issue here is not the Harman research: it's your invocation of the ill-defined notions of resolution and realism.
And you bring up a good point - in that very few measurements (outside of major tilts in the linear regression through an FR curve, which is a no brainer, or "boomy" resonances in the bass region) have been mapped to distinct subjective descriptors of sound and validated through blind listening and publications. It just goes to show the limitations of what we understand when it comes to correlating sound with underlying measurements of transducers.

So, for the purposes of discussion, you can say that my "ill defined notions of resolution and realism" can be translated to "lower listener preference" - i.e. I did not prefer the Genelecs to the HD800 headphones for the two violin recordings. I suppose that if I were to say that "the violins sounded constipated on the Genelecs," that would probably be less accurate.
 
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preload

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I’ll have a bottle of that 63 Lafite please. You guys can drink the kool-aid.
For some people here, if you told them you really enjoyed a glass of the 63 Lafite, but they found out that the pH/temperature/sugar measurements of that vintage were poor, they would tell you that you don't have good taste in wine.
 

preload

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Second track sounded fine to me on both, so I didn't really have any criticism of it. I definitely prefer the way it sounds on Genelec, but that's probably just because I strongly prefer the presentation of loudspeakers. Take any near flat loudspeaker(ex: JBL 308p), and I'm almost always going to prefer it over the 800S, so it's hard for me to really rank speakers against headphones.
Thanks for taking the time to compare. If you can never prefer the sound reproduction of headphones over loudspeakers, this isn't exactly a fair comparison.

I'm curious if anyone else has a pair of Genelec Ones (any model) and a pair of HD800 headphones and would like to compare these two recordings. Please of course ignore the obvious difference in soundstage.
 

Pearljam5000

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What's odd for me is that only the sound of violins is mentioned
Also I don't see the connection to resolution
If they don't have enough resolution i would assume they would sound crappy with pretty much everything and not just violins
 

cinemakinoeye

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Thanks for another delightful review. Considering what many audiophiles spend for a pair of high-end speakers along with a pair of power amplifiers, and special snake-oil cables to round things out, the price tag of a pair of these and a pair of Canare star-quad cables to connect them to a balanced source seems reasonable. I’ve not heard these in the wild, but I have heard other Genelec speakers over the years in a variety of settings and my memories mesh with these results. I have decided if I ever purchase another pair of speakers, Genelec will be on the short list of contenders.
 

Tryphon

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For some people here, if you told them you really enjoyed a glass of the 63 Lafite, but they found out that the pH/temperature/sugar measurements of that vintage were poor, they would tell you that you don't have good taste in wine.
And they will be right. 63 was a really poor vintage for Bordeaux. I 'll stick to 61 for that. And this is a very good example as blind wine testing is rather common practice.
 
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preload

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And they will be right. 63 was a really poor vintage for Bordeaux. I 'll stick to 61 for that. And this is a very good example as blind wine testing is rather common pratice.
LOL fine but not a perfect parallel example (since your evaluation wasn't based on wine "measurements") but I'll roll with it.

Also great example. Even when wines are tasted blindly by incredibly experienced experts, there is STILL marked variation in wine rating scores for the exact same vintage, just as we see in loudspeakers.
 

tmtomh

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Life is complicated. Imagine deciding what wine to drink based on chemical analysis formulated by someone trying to sell wine and ignoring your own taste or the taste of experts who have spent their lives learning what good wine is.

I think this is an interesting analogy - thanks! I agree that it would be silly to drink a particular wine if you don't enjoy it, and to try to force or convince yourself that you like it simply because of a chemical analysis.

But the thing about chemical analysis is that it's objective and can be repeated - or debunked if the analysis is fraudulent or flawed. So the fact that a chemical analysis might be published by a wine seller is reason to want to see the analysis independently verified. But it is not a reason to dismiss or question chemical analysis as a tool, as you are doing in your analogy.

You also appear to base your entire argument on the assumption that chemical analysis has no predictive or descriptive power to enable us to understand why we taste what we taste or how certain factors shape the taste and mouth feel of a wine. I would say that's a flawed assumption.

As for "experts who have spent their lives learning what good wine is," you seem to ignore the possibility that looking at chemical analysis and finding correlations between that analysis and people's taste perceptions and preferences can be a key part of becoming an "expert who has spent their life learning what good wine is." On the flip side, it would not be wise to assume that "I only go by my experience tasting" experts are not influenced by confirmation bias, poor olfactory memory (meaning they can't really be sure if the wine their tasting today is better or worse than one they tasted three years ago or perhaps even three days ago), or cozy relationships with winemakers.

So I'm afraid the position you're advocating is just as liable - if not moreso - to be drinking Kool-Aid. Not to mention, it's only the the chemical analysis that can tell us for sure whether or not what we're drinking is wine or Kool-Aid. :)
 

waldo2

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Many who grew up with the ‘sound’ of vinyl found digital too strident, if you are used to the colouration of traditional loudspeakers you may find transparent loudspeakers not to your taste.
Imagine though if difgital had come first.and then someone proposed vinyl as an ‘improvement’.
Stick with the speakers you enjoy.
Keith
i grew up listening to digital. I have thousands of cds and stream on Qobuz. I hear live music regularly at concerts, and daily in my house. Every time I say I don’t like the speakers on the music on recordings I own, you imply that it is because I like coloration and not transparency. Is it impossible to imagine that these speakers really don’t sound so good on many, if not most, classical recordings out there to people who regularly listen to live acoustic music?
 

waldo2

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And they will be right. 63 was a really poor vintage for Bordeaux. I 'll stick to 61 for that. And this is a very good example as blind wine testing is rather common practice.
You're right. I meant to say 61. Of course, I’ve never tasted that rarified drink, but I have an opinion about it anyway.
 

dshreter

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People are talking past each other in this discussion.
  • There's nothing pejorative about preferring something other than "accurate" reproduction. It doesn't make someone any less of a listener or diminish whether or not they are a discerning listener
  • Preferring a speaker that is less accurate, even if you are a discerning listener, does not imply you've revealed some hidden quality of classical music or other that is recreated more realistically by a speaker that is inferior in terms of measurements. It just means you prefer that sound.
  • Also the circle of confusion strikes again. Classical music mastering may have bias that requires different EQ on average than other genres, though 8361 is perfectly capable if not ideal for implementing an alternative EQ profile.
 

preload

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People are talking past each other in this discussion.
  • There's nothing pejorative about preferring something other than "accurate" reproduction. It doesn't make someone any less of a listener or diminish whether or not they are a discerning listener
  • Preferring a speaker that is less accurate, even if you are a discerning listener, does not imply you've revealed some hidden quality of classical music or other that is recreated more realistically by a speaker that is inferior in terms of measurements. It just means you prefer that sound.
  • Also the circle of confusion strikes again. Classical music mastering may have bias that requires different EQ on average than other genres, though 8361 is perfectly capable if not ideal for implementing an alternative EQ profile.

Your 3rd bullet point (circle of confusion) is perhaps the most important. It’s what prevents a single loudspeaker from being “accurate” for all recordings. This is especially true with classical music, where we know a lot of recordings are mastered with B&W monitors. Which begs the question of what “accurate” really means in terms of measurements.
 

Purité Audio

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i grew up listening to digital. I have thousands of cds and stream on Qobuz. I hear live music regularly at concerts, and daily in my house. Every time I say I don’t like the speakers on the music on recordings I own, you imply that it is because I like coloration and not transparency. Is it impossible to imagine that these speakers really don’t sound so good on many, if not most, classical recordings out there to people who regularly listen to live acoustic music?
You insist on comparing live sound to a recording, they are completely different, I suspect you are for the first time actually hearing exactly what the recording sounds like and you don’t like it.
Keith
 

Purité Audio

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Your 3rd bullet point (circle of confusion) is perhaps the most important. It’s what prevents a single loudspeaker from being “accurate” for all recordings. This is especially true with classical music, where we know a lot of recordings are mastered with B&W monitors. Which begs the question of what “accurate” really means in terms of measurements.
I have never seen any B&W speakers in any studio, except once at Abbey Road where one was being used to keep a door open.
Keith
 

preload

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I have never seen any B&W speakers in any studio, except once at Abbey Road where one was being used to keep a door open.
Keith
You need to look harder and quit bashing product lines that don’t share the same design philosophy as the ones you carry in your shop. You also might want to observe how other vendors here on ASR are very graceful and respectful of competing products and manufacturers.

(But if you feel the need to disrespect your competitors because your business is struggling financially, I can understand that.)
 
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