Genelec G Three

ACTIVE LOUDSPEAKER

- HERB REICHERT

My review samples of Genelec’s G Three powered loudspeaker came with a little hand-sized green and tan cardboard card featuring a poem in bold black letters dated 1898:

At the cottage window a little bird sang. And the light of the window did flicker. And look. The roof up it sprang and the cottage became a house bigger. Look. Into a world the cottage grew and the vast and wide too and filled with song was the air and like new was the sun’s flare.

Below this boldly printed poem, in a smaller, finer font, it said, “Thank you for choosing Genelec. With this poem by Eino Leino (the national poet of Finland) we wish you broadening horizons and new shades of sound.”

I was impressed that a globally respected manufacturer of professional-grade active loudspeakers chose not to loudly declare their obsession with accuracy, science, and measurements, choosing instead to present a poem by a 19th-century Romantic poet.

Backstory

According to Wikipedia,1 “Genelec Oy is a manufacturer of active loudspeaker systems based in Iisalmi, Finland. It designs and produces products especially for professional studio recording, mixing and mastering applications, broadcast, and movie production. The company was co-founded by the late Ilpo Martikainen (1947-2017) and Topi Partanen in 1978.”

If you’ve ever been to a fancy recording studio and stood near one of Genelec’s big, tri-amped, 469lb 1035 studio monitors, you already know that Genelec makes some serious, fierce-looking, military-grade monitoring speakers. They are all active.