Recording - March 2015 - 31

With all those tracks lined up and ready
to play, I set up the 8010A speakers on my
work desk on either side of my laptop, in
an equilateral triangle about 3.5 feet on a
side with respect to my ears... a conventional setup for someone working on mixes
or composing in a DAW in a small room.
I then fired up the first track in my playlist-
and promptly lost four hours in utter listening bliss. Oh... my... gosh.
After several days of listening, in environments ranging from that desktop to a
larger setup in my office at Recording and
a few random rooms loaned to me by
friends and colleagues, I sat down to try
and put into words why these speakers consistently stunned me into reverent silence.
Here goes...
The first thing anyone thinks of when
they see a speaker as small as this is,
"Wow, I'll bet there's no bass at all in those
things." There's a reason why we add subwoofers to small speakers, or make sure
we have decent-sized woofers in our monitors; bass extension suffers when a driver
gets too small. A 5" woofer won't move as
much low-end air as an 8" woofer, and a
3" woofer moves even less. Some folks go
so far as to say that a speaker below a certain size is pretty much useless except as a
check monitor, because without that deep
bass, what hope have you of ever getting
a translatable mix?

Well, color me convinced otherwise. The
8010A produces a remarkable effect when
you listen to it; because it's so clinically and
uncompromisingly flat-from the 20 kHz
"air" range that most adults can only feel
rather than hear, down to the edge of its
very rapid dropoff at 74 Hz... the brain
takes the harmonic content that exists above
the fundamental on instruments like acoustic
and electric bass, kick drum, and grand
piano, and fills in a very satisfying representation of the fundamental. You don't feel
the kick thump you in the chest, or feel your
chair rattle on low bass notes, but there is
enough of the harmonic structure of those
instruments that you can actually "hear into"
the low end with surprising clarity.
When I did mixes on the 8010A, I was
startled and then pleased to hear that nothing really needed to be tweaked afterward, other than EQ decisions below
about 70 Hz. Sure, playing back stuff on
larger monitors revealed imbalances down
there, but everything above that dropoff
was right where it needed to be on the
larger speakers... and on headphones,
and in my car, and on my home stereo. It
seems like magic, but in reality it's just the
effect of a really well designed speaker
delivering the goods. Highs are crisp,
clear and believable; mids present lead
vocals and guitars with forwardness only if
the original was forward; and the upper

structure of the bass leads to a powerful,
emotionally satisfying, yet accurate listening experience.
Conclusions
At $880 per pair, the 8010A is not a
casual purchase... but wow, is it worth
every penny. This is a speaker you can learn
to work with in no time flat, carry in a shoulder bag without getting a sore back, set up
anywhere, and hear what you need to hear
with clarity and accuracy that you'd not
believe possible from something the size
and shape of the crummy desktop speakers
they throw into the bundle when you buy a
PC at your local electronics warehouse.
Maybe that's the problem-we've been
surrounded by tiny speakers that are lousy
for so long, that we've forgotten that it's very
possible, if not cheap, to build tiny speakers
that sound brilliant. If so, that just makes the
8010A even more of a revelation.
My next task is to convince Genelec to
let me hold onto them long enough to try
them in a properly calibrated combination with a subwoofer... and after that, I
may well be saving up to convince
Genelec to let me hold onto them for
good.
Price: $440 each
More from: Genelec, www.genelec.com
http://www.genelec.com http://www.mil-media.com http://www.mil-media.com
Recording - March 2015

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