There's little more satisfying than when a manufacturer pays tight attention to the needs and desires of their customers—even more so when that manufacturer started out as a working player. Jeff Genzler, whose previous company Genz-Benz already revolutionized bass guitar amplification once, is at it again with Genzler Amplification and the application of line array technology to the world of bass cabinets, along with their amplifiers and pedals. In our wide-ranging conversation with Genzler, we had the chance to get the skinny on how the Bass Array concept was developed, the difference between traditional woofer/tweeter cabinets and this relatively new breed, and the kind of difference they can make for the gigging bassist.

You first unveiled the concept of the line array design back in 2015, when you launched Genzler Amplification. Where did that idea come from?

Jeff Genzler: Well, we call it the Bass Array because it takes concepts of a basic bass reflex cabinet with a large woofer, and we combine it with a line array element in the same cabinet, and that line array is multiple small, little 3" speakers. They’re not tweeters. And the array provides all the mids and the highs as far as the frequency response goes. That really hadn't been done in cabinet design for bass players. It’s like a variation of line array systems in the pro audio industry.

Prior to Genzler I had a decade of experience building PA cabinets, bass amps, guitar amps, etc. And this concept had been bouncing around in my brain for quite a while. And after Genz-Benz, when we started up the Genzler Amplification in 2015, we decided to suss out this design concept further. We thought this could be the element that captured attention and delivered what we can offer as the next generation with Genzler Amplification.  

Was there a lightbulb moment?

Well, after Genz-Benz and Fender, I had some time to just kick around and try to figure out some ideas. And with this cabinet design … I don’t know how many napkins I drew this on, just trying to figure out what it was and what it could be. Taller, wider … does it sit on top? Everybody's seeing these stick PA systems with the woofer on the bottom, and line array column pole-mounted on the top. Well, we basically considered that concept, which is very separated, and squished it into one box.

Currently, our engineer that works with me, Scott Andres, is in Arizona still, while I'm in the New York/New Jersey area. Before I moved to New York City and before we started Genzler Amps, we definitely had some “a-ha” moments, and we also had some “are you crazy?” moments, too. “Is this functional? Will it work?”

When we finally put it all together and figured it all out, we tested our first prototype, which I built in the garage. We sat back, adjusted some frequency responses with the crossover and said, “Wow, it works!”

Individually, the woofer and line array do their own thing as efficiently as they can. The woofer reproduces the lows, and the line array does the mids and the highs. But, when we put it all together, it just made one single sound source. And all that sound came right from the middle of the box.

You’ve spoken about the “stick” PAs being a bit of an inspiration. Was there a period where your design resembled that setup, with the array on top?

On paper, yeah. I was traveling a little bit as I was thinking about starting another company, and I used time on airplanes to doodle away. The column moved up and down the inside of the cabinet, but it was always in the cabinet. But bringing it down to where it sits in front of the woofer was one of the last iterations. I said, “Okay, well, this makes it compact,” which is everything a bass player wants. And it also brought all the sound and the sound pressure right in the center of the box, whether you're talking about a 12" in the line array or a 4x10" line array.

One thing that jumps out to me is that the placement of the line array makes me think of the use of diffusers in guitar amps.

I built some. Decades ago, I did.

Does the placement of the line array have similar diffusing qualities?

In our Genz-Benz days, we built diffusers for guitar amps. They look like a little doughnut in the middle, with a couple of mounting arms to attach on. The whole point was that any speaker, guitar speaker, bass speaker, etc., the higher the frequency it produces, then the narrower it comes off the woofer. Where 2kHz and 3kHz are basically coming off the dust cap in the middle of the speaker. That's very beamy. And a guitar speaker can get very harsh. With the Bass Array concept, we roll all that out of the woofer, with the crossover. That doesn’t even come in through the woofer. So, if you take the 12” model, which is the first cabinet we designed, that 12" is doing all the lows up to about 800Hz, and then it starts to roll off gradually. At 2kHz to 3kHz, the energy is very low, so you're not getting anything coming out of the center of the 12".

So, functionally, it doesn’t have to diffuse anything because of how the array is handling the mids.

Yeah. Our line array sits in front of that large woofer, producing the mids and highs, which are taken out of the 12". We went back and forth taking the line array in and out of the cabinet. We could never hear or measure any differences, as far as blocking any response from the woofer behind the array.

Your Magellan and New Classic lines offer a classic woofer/tweeter design. What type of performance differences would the average player experience between those as compared to the Bass Array line?

Frankly, I've heard so many people say the same thing. It's a completely different aural experience. It’s how you hear yourself that is just totally different.

Number one, the sound projects outward on a stage better. It projects and disperses so much better horizontally, as well. That’s why every concert you’re ever going to see is always flying small, stacked line array boxes for their sound reinforcement. They're all the same, and they project out from 120–130 degrees of the center point. The Bass Array concept just lets you hear yourself so much easier.

Now, there are people that like the woofer/tweeter combo. They like that top-end sparkle, or whatever you want to call it. But the line array produces all that frequency as well. It just doesn’t emphasize that top end so much like a compression driver does. It's so hard to tame that frequency out of a compression driver. You want a little bit, but not as much as most of them can do, and they do it because there's a horn on the front of almost every compression driver. Those offer a quite narrow projection, where we're doing those frequencies with a full line array, with all of these drivers working together. So, all the frequencies project out without the top frequencies being focused forward.

Does shifting the mid frequencies over to the array give you more flexibility with woofer selection?

It does. The critical thing is that we're trying to keep these boxes small and really light. Woofer design is always dependent upon the cabinet design, which is always dependent upon the woofer. Will a specific speaker work in a small enough box that we can have the efficient porting we need? So many times, we get these boxes so small, [but] the correct porting just doesn’t fit. There are tradeoffs in everything, but there’s the amalgamation of all the good things that we want outweighing any tradeoffs that might not have been as good.

Does the overall impact of the different sonics from the array design have any practical benefit as far as playing styles? You’ve spoken a lot about how different it sounds.

We came up with the concept. We tested it around with a few players that we respected, playing various styles, amps and effects, and some of the earliest comments we heard then are some of the same comments that we hear today when people buy their first Bass Array: “I hear myself so much easier in a band setting.”

The first person that knows you've brought another cabinet onto the stage is the drummer. They say, “Man, I hear you so much better. And you're not louder.” I like to think of it as finesse instead of brute force. Brute force being volume and pushing it out. Finesse is using those frequencies and getting them out across the stage so much more efficiently.

Three things that come back more and more is that players say, “I've got to work on my technique,” because they can hear themselves so much better. The second thing is, “Every one of my instruments sounds like that instrument.” And the third thing is, particularly for really accomplished players who have been playing a long time, “I have so much less fatigue in my forearm when I'm playing and digging in."

As an amp builder and cabinet builder, I understand we're far down the food chain. The bassist, they love their instrument, and they are touching that instrument constantly. The strings are so important. All that goes through the cable into the amp and cabinet behind them. But everything they do with that instrument in their hands comes back through the amp and speaker, and it’s just that connectivity that players testify, “Oh, man, I don’t have to work so hard.”

In summation, it sounds like you’ve been talking about how you really hear the full sound of the bass, not just the fundamental frequency.

Yes. Our first NAMM show with these cabs, we got all different levels of players. There were players everywhere, and they would be carrying around their own instruments. They'd go play [the Bass Arrays] in the booth, and all of them would say, “It’s so even all the way up and down the neck. So even. Up high, through the mid and all the way down to the bottom B string. It's just so even. Nothing sticks out.” And these players are popping and slapping, and doing other intricate things. All the characteristic just comes out, and many, many, many times, I've heard from players, not in a negative sterile way, but this is really a reference monitor for bass.

Would you describe it as being “hi-fi”?

Yeah. It is true tone. And that comes out. When we port the cabinets, we have to get all the low frequency we can get. We like a little bit of a bump in the response, right around 80Hz to 100Hz, which is a natural feeling for the bass instrument. But we don't want this big scoop in the middle, and then a top peaked and all that. We want it to be fairly smooth. And that's what the blend of the woofer and the line array concept does. I mean it's amazing when you play these two elements by themselves. You can take the grille off and disconnect the line array from the front of the cabinet—just to be playing along—and hear how much is coming out of that line array and how there is really no top-end clarity or definition coming out of the woofer. Whether you’re performing live or in your room, the mids and the clarity are so important. That's what we're focusing on with the line array element.

What kind of impact does all of this have on the overall stage volume and monitoring situation? It probably lets the drummer and bassist lock in a bit better. You used to play out quite a bit yourself, right?

Yeah. I played for about 12 years in bar bands. Our motto was, “It doesn’t have to be good to be fun,” and we lived up to it. This was back in the ’70s and ’80s. We played five nights a week, 50 weeks a year. And we just knew the crowd, knew us, and knew that our biggest enemy was ourselves. When we got pumped up and ramped up, our audience was right in front of us, and we would just get so freaking loud. We would just be fighting ourselves. And I stood next to the drummer. I was the guitarist and the vocalist. I stood next to the drummer, and our bassist was to the right of me. So, they were kind of disjointed a little bit.

But as you get on bigger stages with more players, you get separation from not being on top of each other. But you’ve still got to get your sound across there. Let’s say you’re set up with a woofer/tweeter cab. The focus of that thing is going out in a very specific direction. Maybe you point it across the stage, or something like that, but then your audience sacrifices a little. But with the line array concept, wherever you are on the stage as a bassist, it really does project through horizontally so that everyone on stage can enjoy the even tone of what you're producing, and you're not blowing anybody out by just being loud. I hear it constantly. The band just loves us. Everybody.

So, it’s really going to improve everything, from front-of-house to onstage monitoring, because now the drummer doesn’t need the bassist just roaring out of a wedge or an in-ear or sidefills.

Yeah. We’ve got players all over the country that gig every week, and you can just hear them from the back of the room. “You're not loud but you’re there. I can hear everything you're doing.” Nothing drops out.

In a live setting, you're fighting through the crowd half the time. You're pretty much putting a blanket in front of your band if you pack the house. From my own experience, if we got a full house, we had to blow through them to get our sound around the room. And in this setting here, that's exactly what the Bass Array is doing. It is projecting the sound around the room, but to an extent that it doesn’t have to be overly loud. It's just present. And that's the biggest thing about it. The clarity, the definition. It's not “boom, tink, boom, tink”, very bright, which you kind of get with a woofer/tweeter design.

I’ve been to so many bar gigs where a bassist pops the strings, and it just splits your head. It's so harsh.

Even before we ever came up with the Bass Array concept at our former company, we had a variety of different designs where we didn’t have much of a tweeter. I mean years ago, I built a cabinet for Brian Bromberg, the jazz bassist, and it was a 15" with two 5" speakers. Because his bass had piezo pickups on each string, that thing was the hottest, brightest instrument you could ever hear. He played it masterfully, but you don’t want to put that into something that's got tweeters. It'll just split your hair, if you have hair. [laughs]

Outside of the overall sonic improvements, are there bigger picture engineering improvements or efficiencies that come from this design?

Yeah. We’ve advanced the design from the original 12" and line array, and thus, we have the Bass Array Series 2, which is the first real changeover since we launched the original design in 2015. But, yes, I think that especially in the mids, in a woofer/tweeter design, you rely on that woofer to do all those important mids up to where the tweeter turns on. Most of them are 3kHz and above. Well, that's so much of the most integral part of a bass tone, especially in a live setting, that you're relying on a very inefficient way to do it. And it's our line array concept that just does that so much more cleanly and so much more efficiently.

With cabinet design, in general, you don’t want to make the best-sounding cabinet in the world, but it’s so inefficient that you’ve got to have a 1,000 or 2,000-watt amplifier to get any output out of it. In this line array, Bass Array concept, all the components are blended and very well-matched for their sensitivity. So, our 12” is 98dB from one meter out, which is phenomenal sensitivity. Every watt that goes in is way efficient coming out, and you don’t need a 1,000-watt amplifier to really play gigs.

We make a Magellan 350. At 8 ohms, it’s about 175 watts. We get tons of players using that little 350 head on our Bass Array 12, and they’re playing bars. They’re playing with drummers. And they’ve got everything they need, because the projection and the clarity are so present that they don’t need big power. That goes back to the brute force versus finesse overview I spoke of earlier.

What did you see as the opportunities for improvement as you were developing in the new Series 2?

When I came back to build this company, I was relying on my supply chain, which I had built up for decades with my previous company. And that goes back to speaker suppliers, amp builders, etc.

We launched the Bass Array concept in 2015 with an Italian speaker company, Faital Speakers. And the design of the drivers we used really complemented what we were trying to do and develop with what was available at the time. We needed a 3" driver that could really crossover at 800Hz with enough efficiency on its own that when we stacked four or more of them together, we had enough efficiency to match the woofer. Unfortunately, most manufacturers’ small speakers just won’t do it. I don’t care how many you match up. So, we were very fortunate to have that speaker supplier.

Over the years, going through the pandemic, with all the challenges with the cost of raw materials, particularly the best speakers in the world, pricing just kept going through the roof. We knew we needed to take a second look at our concept and really reassess our requirements. “How much driver/motor do we need? What are the critical points in our design that we need in a driver to invest in to get back what we're trying to produce?” And the costs, we just couldn’t continue; we couldn’t keep raising the price. I don’t care if you have the best cabinet in the world. If it's $2,500 for a 1x12", then no one's going to buy it.

It was really about finding the balance of making the best product we can put out for the working musician, or someone that never leaves their house. It’s about making it among the premier products available in the marketplace, but also financially affordable. In doing so, we looked around and started working with another vendor. These are still Italian-designed speakers, but they came at things a little bit differently, differences to the speaker frame, for example, and various kinds of things.

So, these are all neodymium drivers, and how they’re built is very important. Even in our other cabinets, with all our speaker designs, it’s all about the soft parts. That’s the actual paper cone, the surround, the spider inside that goes back and forth, the voice coil itself. How much heat can it take? All of it. Finding a really efficient 3” driver has been critical. Over the years, we learned more about other possible [speaker] vendors, and we said, “You know what, we haven’t changed in so long. We need to look at this so we can continue to make a very high-level premier cabinet in the world, but also not double the price.”

Since then, we’ve developed a great relationship with a vendor, with the voice coil design being absolutely critical for our requirements. On the drivers we use now, there’s more actual copper where the magnet and voice coil gap is, so it handles more power. It dissipates heat better. It doesn’t mis-form as you drive it harder. It doesn’t get as deformed during heat, as this kind of a driver normally would because of the balance of inside and outside windings on the voice coil. That's the same with the little 3" we use now, as well as the larger 10”, 12” and 15” speakers. So, in doing this, the tonality of the drivers we selected [for Series 2] were a little bit different … a different clarity in the woofers. We can actually rate the power level of these new speakers a little bit higher. Additionally, we found that with some of the structural changes, the basket weight and all that, we're saving a couple pounds here and there. On our 4x10", we lost six pounds in the weight. It went from 55 to 49 pounds.

That's huge.

It's all the little pieces.

I was talking with a pickup designer years ago, and he really emphasized the importance of the whole “system.” His thing was, it’s not just about designing pickups in isolation. It’s not just about the windings or the magnet materials. He really emphasized how much little changes in other parts of the guitar could impact the pickup performance. Everything really is connected.

Exactly. Once we've selected a driver, we spend a lot of time inside the cabinet saying, “What happens with how much acoustic dampening we put inside?” We learned years ago, in our Genz-Benz days, that sometimes we didn’t want acoustic dampening on the back of the cabinet because we wanted the reflection. Keep in mind, at that time, it was like a woofer/tweeter cabinet. We wanted more mids out of the woofer, so we wanted more reflection of the mids inside the cabinet that would come back through the driver. And you can do that in guitar [amp] designs, too, with open-back or sealed-back cabinets. And that still happens as we look at the inside of the cabinet and consider the type of porting we want to do.

Years ago, we developed a port shelf that is radiused on the top and the bottom just like the leading edge of an airplane wing. The leading edge of an airplane wing isn't square. It's rounded. And the speed coming through a port is measured in Mach speeds. So, you have so much air coming through there. If you just round the edge of the port shelf on the inside of the cabinet, you get a cleaner tone, with less air turbulence coming out of the port than if you just stuck a square piece of wood back there with sharp. I've been doing that since the '90s.

As you approached designing the new Series 2 Bass Arrays, did it all start with the speakers? Did you select those and just go from there?

Well, we looked at everything. Based on all the feedback we got on the first generation, we knew the concept was great. First and foremost was that we had to find drivers that could do what we needed, at the price point we needed. Once we started that and settled on our speakers, we started hearing differences. So, we looked at the crossover point. We changed some things and said, “You know what, our goal was we wanted to be as good or better because we knew we had to change, but we didn’t want to go backwards.”

We knew we had to call it a Series 2, because our customer is very discerning. We couldn’t just start changing components and have people thinking, “Oh, my drivers sound a little different than the previous one that I bought.” That's why it's a Series 2. All the drivers have changed. We looked at some porting differences and a couple of cabinets have little porting differences. But as we went through all of them, we just said, “Wow, what a nice improvement.”

When we first launched the Bass Array 12, it was a square box, just like every other small, 12” bass cabinet. Well, we got feedback from people that they were having to tip it up, particularly the 1x12" model, because it’s so short. So, we took a look and thought about it. Over the years, we’d built a lot of PA cabinets, and all those PA cabinets were trapezoidal. With trapezoidal boxes, you get very few standing waves inside the cabinet, because standing waves come from perpendicular panels, which you don’t have in trapezoid cabinet shapes. They’re at a 15-degree tilt, or something like that. So, we looked at the inside of the Bass Array 12 and said, “Let’s cut the bottom off and tilt it back six degrees.” We did that. Oh, my gosh. [It had] the same components, but everything sounded different! It points up at you a little more, and if you measure it, it’s the same frequency response as the straight, square cabinet shape. But your ears aren't technical instruments. Your ears are “art.” What you hear with this change in cabinet shape is, it feels a little brighter. The low frequencies are there, but it feels a little cleaner in the low end, too. And what it gave us—when we stacked them together—was all sorts of different responses. Most people think you'd put a straight on the bottom and a slant on the top. Well, you can do that. But if you put the slant on the bottom and the straight on the top, now both cabinets slant up, offering a more immediate response and projection.

And I’m assuming with these changes, with the increased mid-high clarity, you’re getting better overall volume management, because players don’t have to crank up the amp to overcompensate?

Yeah. If you’re a true technician of your art, then the better you hear yourself, the less pain you might get in your forearm. You just don’t have to play as hard, so you can play longer.

If you were to sum it up for someone either new to the concept of Bass Array, or someone considering jumping from the first gen to Series 2, what are the most meaningful improvements?

I think the first thing you’ll hear is that in almost every model, there’s more clarity. There’s more top end.

To be clear, the drivers in the original Bass Array are great. And while some people may claim that anything over 6kHz is a waste, I’ll disagree. There’s so much air up there, even if you don’t hear it from the strings. There’s nuance. There’s harmonics and octaves of the notes you're playing that extend further.

One thing we heard from time to time from players is that they had to turn up the treble a bit more in the original Bass Array. Well, now, that’s a different story. The Series 2 has more top end because our new 3" drivers go up to about 18kHz. The Series 2 has more clarity out of the line array just because those speakers are a little different. It's in the same size array column. That chamber didn’t change. Our crossovers haven't changed. So yeah, first thing would be that there’s just a little more clarity and definition. They’re rated to handle more power as well, 50-100 watts more per model.

Second, almost all of the cabinets are a little lighter. The 15” model ended up being about the same weight, but the 12s are a little lighter. The 2x10" is lighter. The 4x10" is much lighter.

The third thing is just the overall improvements across the board, which I think is especially notable with the 10" models, which really took off. The new 10" driver has much more low end. It's deeper. So, our 2x10" will have more low end if you like that, and in my mind, the 4x10" had the biggest changes. It has so much more depth to it. That is our biggest Bass Array model. For a single cabinet, that is the premier design. The line array just really came to life in that model. All of the other models sound better, in my opinion, but perhaps not as notably as the 4x10" in particular.

So, you’ve picked up and moved across the country since your Genz-Benz days, and you’re now based out of Brooklyn. I’m curious how being in a different community has impacted your approach to the business. New York City is obviously home to one of the most diverse, vibrant music scenes in the world.

When I first got here—I think it was 2014—I was just taking a breather after leaving Fender. And what struck me was walking down the streets of Brooklyn. I couldn’t believe how many upright bassists I saw, with the big wheel on the bottom rolling their instrument right down the steps, right into the subway.

It's amazing. And I never seen so many guitars on peoples' backs! What a strong and diverse musician population. It seemed like the one continuous thread was the importance of ease and transport and flexibility of gear that is required.

Has any of that changed or informed your perspective since you launched Genzler?

Yeah, I mean it always has. When I was playing [out], I owned the PA. I owned the monitors and all that stuff, and I had the big van. So, [considering] how big gear was, how it traveled, how you transported gear was always part of my lexicon.

When we had Genz-Benz, back in the mid-2000s, when we first addressed lightweight amps, we immediately addressed lightweight cabinets. They're small, compact and they went together. A lot of manufacturers brought out the little lightweight amp, but they still had this 45-pound 1x12" cabinet, you know? That's how we think, and that’s how we do things.

But yeah, being in Brooklyn and seeing all these players, and there's so many amp manufacturers.

There are a lot of bass companies in the New York area.

Roger Sadowsky is right in Long Island City. He became a great friend. And up north, you know, there’s a variety of different manufacturers, like Mike Tobias, Spector Basses, etc. There are amp builders everywhere. And, surprisingly, there's recording studios everywhere. I’d be reading a magazine and see that so-and-so was recording here, right off in Red Hook, or other parts of Brooklyn—right around the corner. I’d walk by that place every morning to go and get a coffee. I didn’t know there was a recording studio there!

That's one of the things about New York—you think something is just a space above a bodega, and you walk by with no idea what’s going on inside. And then you walk in!

Definitely!

You know, there’s quite a bass syndicate here, if you want to call it that. It’s such a vibe, and there are a lot of events going on, and people get connected. It makes you think a little differently, you know, with players everywhere, and how they play! Players are changing. We've come out with a variety of pedals, the most recent of which is our Magellan preamp/D.I. pedal. It's our amplifier's preamp in a little one-pound, two-button pedal. Players just love it! They can use it for in-ear monitors or put it on the pedalboard, and they get their Magellan tone in a teeny-tiny package.

Okay, here’s our final question. Tinkering with anything fun that you can share?

Well, we're always tinkering, but we never talk about something until we’re sure it’s ready to launch publicly. So, yes, we're always working on something, and there will be more interesting things to come. We’re a small company, but we’re in touch with what players ask for. Nothing’s static in our industry or our world. So, we're always looking at how do we need to adapt—"What can we do in this realm? What can we put our thumbprint on and offer something uniquely Genzler?" And, certainly, the Bass Array has been that. You really won't find any other Bass Array concept bass cabinets around the world anywhere. That's what we do. Our amplifiers have this natural clarity and tone, and it's so easy to get a great tone out of them. Again, that's what we do.