I of course am not trying to change your opinions here, but just to say that soffit mounting speakers that are this heavy usually requires re-engineering of the room, and possibly a section of the building depending on the static forces involved (e.g. are the speakers angled down? What part of the building carries the load to the required safety rating?)
Many studios also choose to 'float' the studio floor (mechanically decouple it from the foundation) while creating concrete slab towers upon which the soffited speakers sit. This eliminates unwanted vibration in the studio, even at the high SPL required at long listening distances.
I'm sure there are home studios in mansions with soffited systems, but all the cases I've heard about (or been party to), these configurations approach six figures to install, and aren't done without a contractor, acoustician, and probably an architect. Why? Because you don't want to have to move anything once installed, so the room has to be modelled to the nth degree.
With that in mind, the W371 achieves something pretty extraordinary by just being able to slap them in a room and give essentially the same quality of sound.
No doubt there are levels of systems and acoustic design. To suggest getting these replace $100k of design and construction is perhaps overstating their capabilities.
I went over the GLM manual yesterday and it states the 5 modes.
Mode 1 basically turns them into 5-way units.
Mode 2: does controlled dispersion to 50Hz - I think this is the mode most people will be buying these for. Measurements would be nice to confirm that.
Mode 3-5: can use both woofers to cancel either/or - floor reflection point, side wall reflection point, or back wall reflection point.
I have 8341s. Not very heavy. My setup is relatively near field but they are 6ft away from me each.
I would basically toe in for maximum soundstage at my listening position. Lock that in. Two pieces of sheet rock, some insulating fiber, some reinforcement plus the genelec wall mounting kit would cost maybe $3k all said and done. Kits price of $1k included.
Side reflections if they show an issue in the seating position FR graph I would treat. Back wall is taken care of. Dispersion for bass is 180 degrees as opposed to 120 degrees for the W371. So that is an advantage to the W371.
But certainly all positions must be carefully selected.
I’m not saying these are not useful for some studios. They must be for sure but there are options if you can modify your room.
At 140lbs each the portability aspect is just not that attractive.
A nice aluminum shell dual woofer units which attach to the genelec stand would be nice. Then we can also keep our existing genelec subs.
Also I hope that GLM supports multiple subs playing together and correcting for that. It currently only optimizes each sub individually.
Every day I hear the 8341 I am thankful that somebody designed and manufactured these. They are just incredible and quite the accessible end game monitors in their own right. No such thing as “reference listening” anymore. You don’t have to concentrate. Every little detail just reveals itself. It jumps at you. If you close your eyes performers can be in front of you. I would advise wholeheartedly that anyone who can stretch their budget to $6k in the sense they will not be spending for 10 years on speakers and dacs and other audio bs. That they should always just go for it and get it over with. The value proposition is incredible. Besides the sweet spot is really only foot or so wide. Your head has to be within those bounds. If inside it’s incredible. Outside it’s still good but there is no convincing center image any more. Sitting close sounds so good the image is incredible.
Not to diminish the achievement but we are talking about 2 woofers in a box each with a pEq. GLM autocal 2 does all the heavy lifting in the cloud.