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Where are we thus far? Springy dry bass, impulse fidelity and being lighter in overall mass are all obvious assets for rhythmically intense fare. But don’t limit this speaker by shoving it into the Rock ‘n’ Roll corner. Though clearly happy to get down and raunchy, the Blumenhofer is a microdynamic tracker par excellence. Civilized gourmet fare is very much on the menu. That needn’t be spiked electronically to come off.

Even so, math rock, art noise or whatever current music review lingo calls ex Pivot output PVT worked rather well. In fact I had to involuntarily giggle over the Oz band’s belligerent insistence to lead common listener expectations astray, whether by garnishing fetching melodies with an overload of electronic ambiance to have them stumble in your brain; or by contrasting seemingly heady electro elements with juicily rocking e-guitar riffs only to make those sprier to convert bona fide rock-out basics into something fancier. All this the Blumenhofers parlayed directly and transparently to involve me even when this did tweak Church with no Magic to become wirier and less approachable. But never mind, I was really getting to the overall dynamic behavior and its general impact. It turned out to be a quite multi-faceted subject.

Genuine dynamics: I already covered dynamic impulsiveness. This obviously benefited driven tunes. This speaker’s dynamic contrasts kicked in at such low levels that background listening became almost impossible. It quite simply elbowed itself into the foreground. I had a hard time handling correspondence or similar at the same time. Socially conscious grooving at late hours thus worked brilliantly and most chores can be readily postponed for the following day, can’t they?


This applied also to my customary 80dB-in-the-seat levels, i.e. not extremely loud but clearly elevated. Lower levels with most speakers tend to lack in liveliness. I typically find myself bumping up the volume control during evening sessions. Not so with the Genuin FS3. I regularly started off too high and had to compensate by going counter clockwise. I viewed this as proof positive that dynamic range was less compressed than usual.


This speaker additionally knows how to top off already high median levels with peaks of real gusto to suffer no reasonable limitations. Obviously anything redlines eventually but my ears gave out before determining where this speaker might. This dynamic flair also benefited resolution and sound textures. I assume that the treble horn taking over at a relatively low 1.2kHz carried a good portion of responsibility for this microdynamic finesse. In the end of course we needn’t know exactly how if we fancy this key quality. Should you find that you could do with less raw data, you’d deny half of this speaker’s appeal.


The Jazz number "Tilldess" by the Ulf Sandberg Quartett sports typical instrumentation of piano, tenor sax, drums and upright bass. With a generous length of about 8 minutes it really shows off how deep the Blumenhofer digs into all the recorded crevices. This begins with the cymbal work. If you’ve heard this number with three or four different speakers already, you’re very aware that they all differ in relative airiness. The Blumenhofer belongs to those speakers with extraordinarily resolved shimmering treble. No matter how soft the ticks on brass, they never blur nor does their sustain fuzz over into a diffusive gray background. Everything is tracked very precisely beginning to end.

On sustain, this cut sports not only unusually long ring-outs but a resonating ‘something else’ that fills the decays with more complexity than a standard cymbal. Not every speaker knows this. Most will fade out fine but homogenize the harmonic content. When I heard "Tilldess" over the Genuin for the first time, my inner eye rebuilt a recent scene at the A-Trane club where a drummer had worked the same type of riveted brass – and that’s exactly how it sounded here (you can find a proper description of this sizzle cymbal here and interesting sound samples of different types with maker Meinl.)


The FS3 unpeeled these treble textures exceptionally astute. There were no milky obscurations of the inner structure, no tizz, no sandiness, no softening. Despite this nearly microscopic rendering of ‘molecular’ inner detail, things never got laboratory, academic or pedantic. Just as in the bass, detail was accompanied by serene relaxation. By now you might question what I mean to convey by ‘academic vs relaxation’ relative to resolution.