During the course of the 2022 Pacific Audio Fest, I heard a few comments about the “Infinity IRS Beta” room. Was someone showing off another vintage pair of state-of-the-art speakers like the first pair of Wilson WAMMs back at AXPONA? The mystery was solved when I visited Gary Koh‘s Genesis Advanced Technologies room and was introduced to the enormous flagship Genesis Prime Plus (price TBD).
“These are NOT Infinity IRS Betas,” Gary explained to the crowd. But he did explain the historic connection to those old IRS towers and the Genesis Prime Plus, how Gary worked with Arnie Nudell, who designed the IRS and later founded Genesis Technologies, and how Gary took over Genesis from Arnie some years ago, and how these are Gary’s designs that are based on those old yet formidable speakers of the past. As Gary elaborated, the Genesis Prime Plus isn’t an IRS Beta–but it might be considered the tenth generation.
Gary Koh did apologize to the crowd for the newness of this pair of Genesis Prime Plus, and that if you stood close enough to the towers you could still smell the finishes. But Gary also hosted a live big band performance earlier in the show and recorded it on a bank of Studer reel-to-reels and then played it back for us. While the vocalist could “peg the meters” while belting out these songs, there was an undeniable sense of the live event, of how the live performance probably sounded just as wildly dynamic and realistic as the playback.
The Genesis Prime Plus towers were, of course accompanied by an amazing system including lots of Merrill Audio amplification, Gary’s own Genesis Advanced Technologies turntable and a tonearm from The Wand. Since the room was so big and the Genesis Prime Plus towers were brought so far away from the back wall, we were treated to one of the deepest and widest soundstages I’ve heard at a high-end audio show. This might have been the biggest system at PAF 2022, and it was certainly one of the most impressive.
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