In the 1960s Arnie Nudell ran the laser lab at Litton Industries and built speakers at home in his garage. His best bass came from a big homemade Klipschorn, until he and his colleague John Ulrick set a small servo-controlled woofer beside it. "The minute we compared the systems was when I saw religion," Nudell told Robert Harley of Stereophile. Every Genesis woofer works on that idea. A sensor on the woofer reports how the cone is actually moving, and a circuit compares that with the music and corrects it, pushing harder when the cone lags and stopping it the moment a note ends. Genesis says the woofer then behaves as if it had almost no mass. For the treble Genesis uses a ribbon tweeter so light that, the company says, the original had less moving mass than the air in front of it. Genesis suits listeners who want deep, clean bass and a tall, open soundstage.

The G7 series is the way in, and Tom Lyle of Enjoy the Music found the G7 Samba outperformed many floorstanders priced well above it. Its woofer has its own servo amplifier built in, and Lyle rarely needed his two subwoofers. With the deepest bass handled inside the speaker, your main amplifier has an easier job, and Karl Lozier of Positive Feedback, writing about the servo-equipped G6.1, asked for "High-quality, not high-powered" amplification. Many Genesis models fire a second tweeter backward, so give them room behind. Constantine Soo of Dagogo gave his G6.1e 5 feet. Setting up Foxtrots for Ken Redmond of Tracking Angle, designer Gary Koh moved them toward or away from the front wall to set the bass, then adjusted their spacing, and set the tweeter level last while a violin recording played. Lozier says less than a decibel on the level controls can make an "almost shocking difference."

The garage speaker became the Servo-Statik 1, the first product of Infinity, which Nudell co-founded with Ulrick and Cary Christie. His Infinity Reference Standard, or IRS, filled four towers with 12 woofers, 24 planar midranges and 72 tweeters, and Genesis says many owners still use theirs after more than 40 years. Paul McGowan, co-founder of PS Audio, once met Nudell for dinner in Beaver Creek, Colorado, and found tweeters lined up on the table and a new company planned around one. "If you have a wonderful tweeter, the rest of it falls into place," McGowan recalls him saying, and that tweeter was the first version of the Genesis tweeter. Genesis says its first flagship, the Genesis One, went beyond even the IRS. Redmond notes that a refined version of that ribbon tweeter goes into every Genesis speaker today, from the Prime flagship to the G7s.