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Genelec Celebrates Silver Anniversary at AES

New York City (October 10-13, 2003)--With a scenic factory location on the shore of Lake Porovesi in Iisalmi, Finland, the original founders of Genelec OY (Demo Room 3D06)--president Ilpo Martikainen, vice president/technical director Topi Partanen and financial director Ritva Leinonen--still actively run the enterprise 25 years later. Martikainen jovially admits "the first 10 years were quite painful." The eventual success bore out the perceived quality of the company's approach, he says--the products and what their use revealed to the end user about their own recordings.

With the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation in Helsinki, Finland as its first customer in 1978, Genelec built its reputation with broadcasters, before emphasizing the recording market in the 1980s. In 1983, Genelec introduced its proprietary Directivity Control Waveguide Technology, continuously in use since and still in constant refinement. An exclusive high-output, low-distortion, midrange driver soon followed. Though the first commercial product was a mid-size 3-way system, the S30, studio demands saw the introduction of large studio monitor systems, led by the 1035A which was introduced at the 1989 AES Convention in Hamburg, Germany. Genelec systems rapidly found their way into prestigious studios worldwide.

The company's product line today includes main control room monitors, biamped and triamped models and biamped speakers with digital inputs. The latest extensions to the product family are a response to the growing use of subwoofers and bass-managed speaker systems--the LSE line of active subwoofers. Employing its proprietary Laminar Spiral Enclosure for trend-setting "high-mass (volume), low-velocity, low-turbulence" subwoofer performance, the LSE line adds intelligently designed and full-featured bass-management capabilities. The line ranges from compact models to the 7073A, the latter equipped with four 12-inch drivers, fast-acting, low-distortion amplifiers and yielding 124 dB SPL capability down to 19 Hz. Pre-packaged systems pair LSE subs with Genelec's 1029A compact powered speakers in 2.1 and 5.1 configurations, the Triple Play and PowerPak, respectively.

--Frank Wells