I'm not sure if this is psychological or not, but I have a pair of 8030Bs setup on a desk, on stands about 18" above the surface.
I hadn't used the office in a while, and when I turned them back on, they sounded quite bright and harsh. I thought maybe there was some configuration interaction with the Genelec 7050C sub, but taking that out of the loop. they still had the same harshness.
I checked the treble tilt control, and it was normal.
I compared them to a set of older 8020 (forget which version, a or b) from another desk, and those sounded as expected (tho to be fair, they were placed a bit differently).
My home desk setup has a pair od 8330s, no sub, and they sound great. Maybe they've spoiled me? But I compared them to a pair of Dynaudio BM5m3 we have, and while I always felt the BM5s were a bit bright, my 8030b sounded much brighter.
Another weird thing is that both of them are affected. They were manufactured the same month.
What I'm truly wondering is could failing capacitors affect the frequency response? I don't have another pair of 8030b available to compare them to.
Thoughts?
Comments
Some follow up on this: I swapped the 8030b pair with a pair of 8020a and the 8020a sound as I expect Genelecs to sound. One thing I noticed is that I had the turn the front panel gain all the way up n the 8030B to match the level of the 8020A wit its front panel gain set to the 1 o'clock position. It was then I realized that there was almost no sound coming from the woofer.
So long story short, I found a YouTube video "Fixing Genelec 8030b" that lead me indirectly to a forum thread about replacing caps on older 80x0 monitors which fixes the problem of low bass output. Later forum threads point to a single 22mf SMD cap that needs replacing. Sadly, SMD work is not for the feint of heart, so now I need to find someone who repair it, or else see if Genelec will sell me a replacement amp module.
I update this for anyone coming upon the post: if you're having a similar issue, it's an electrolytic cap. (It's almost always a capacitor, isn't it?) And it seems like a lot of 80x0 models made around 2014 have the issue.
PS- My old 2007 Genelec 8020A don't have the problem! Other people reporting that older 8030A models are still working fine. Looks like Genelec got a bad run of caps.
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