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The actual port tube with its constant cross section of ca. 6 x 5cm runs five centimetres behind the front baffle. The final stretch to the baffle is a flare to 15.5 x 5cm. The purpose of this is "superior acoustic impedance transfer without port noise disturbance". Of course a horn mouth of less than 80cm² won’t lift the kilts of horn maniacs. Nonetheless it’s interesting that Blumenhofer considered the matter important enough to bother with a solid hand-crafted MDF construction of his own design rather than mail-ordering a plastic port tube from an online catalogue.


Relative to treble horn details he remained resolutely mum beyond the basics of a 1-inch Titanium dome compression affair developed after lots of trial and error. Attempts at more were blocked by "company secret". In the end engineering secrets matter less than results.


Sonics: Obviously €9.000 can buy more bass extension and sheer SPL if that’s what you need or want. In my 100m³ space the Genuin moved sufficient air to sound balanced while having one foot on the yin side of the Tao. Let’s remember that this speaker is merely one meter tall and operates with about 35 litres of bass loading using just one 8-incher. You’d expect Physics to correlate.


In the sub bass there’s thus no uprooting of giant trees but in the second octave output is linear. There’s no upper bass lift to obscure what’s above and below. The bass of the FS 3 is well defined, very dry and highly differentiated. Take Cake’s song "Hem of your garment". Drums and e-bass are rendered effortlessly and crisp and cleanly separated where less resolved speakers often homogenize. My Ascendo System F admittedly brings greater mass to bear on this subject and sounds even more complete and with equally high differentiation power - yet the Blumenhofer played tauter/faster and cracked harder on drum hits. This was the difference of being eight and four meters away from a club’s stage. Sticks meeting skin were more violent. That was infectiously immediate!


Next to these dryly contrasted aspects, the bass trait I loved best was a rarely encountered fleet-footed directness. Synth bass, bass drums and similar all were delivered springy, free and effortlessly to never suggest work, muscle and sweat. It was always loose fluffy play as though a right-handed drummer felt free to spontaneously switch to the left hand while everything stays in the pocket. Obviously speakers with more surface area like a Naim Ovator, Zu Presence or full bass horns will add further impact without upsetting those lithe airy aspects. Still, Blumenhofer’s Genuin FS 3 is blessed by the same gene. A welcome fringe benefit is PraT factor. This is a very lively speaker.


That virtue clearly related to very instantaneous rise times. Here nothing was gemütlich or ponderous. There was no artificial hardness to intrude on the music from the outside either. Yet whenever it was supposed to be hard as recorded, this speaker clearly was no pastel painter. This meant that things sounded a tad closer than usual – and depending on taste this could be a decisive tad.


Perhaps that should have been no real surprise what with that hard-hung woofer and treble horn. Impulse fidelity was simply high. This ‘denuded’ direct contact with the music was one side of this coin. The even but by tendency lighter tonal balance was the other. To avoid misunderstanding, this requires elucidation. I do not believe that the relative bass and treble proportions leaned slightly toward the latter as hyper-attentive readers just might presume from the above.


My observation was instead that on sustained tones from woods, strings, voices and electronica nothing shifted to brighter or darker than what we generally regard as neutral. If it nonetheless sounded somewhat lighter this came from a combination of respectably pressurized and phenomenally fast bass which simply lacked maximal extension; and an extraordinary flair for leading edges captured in real time. Those sound steeper and more treble intense.


A piano hammer can hit its string quite hard and a heftily whacked snare from at a certain SPL can outright hurt – and some might want this delivered uncut. A sonorous male baritone meanwhile remained sonorous without hollowing out or fogging up with hoarseness. In short, this is a linear speaker with particularly greased transients whose extension lacks just a bit to meet the ‘full-range’ mark. Tonally this adds up to a specific form of lightness.