Next, Ari Varla, Chief Acoustical Engineer at Genelec (and one of those former high school friends) spoke. He described speaker parameters that they (and we) want to see: good anechoic response, good real room response, good off-axis response, and good reliability among others. This is effectively dealt with in a packaged, active (powered) speaker system with all necessary parameters engineered together. He pointed to a stack of equipment that users of non-active speakers must deal with: speaker cabinets, amplifier, electronic crossover, equalizer and interconnecting cables. All this still needs to be sorted out and still will not have active protection for the drivers based on their power capabilities. This is all packaged inside of the active monitor, and engineered to work as a system. Ari described one test of their active protection - playing ZZ Top music at high volume. Ari described the well known advantages of bi-amping such as power amplifiers tailored to the drivers, and more efficiency. Acoustic effects such as cabinet design and directivity control at crossover were discussed as well.

The meeting ended after questions from the audience.