The long-awaited HUMAN 81 DK is now available.
Best viewed in "landscape" mode.
Green Foam?
Sorry, no.
Every few months someone asks me if I sell "green foam" surrounds so they can patch up some aging Genesis speakers from the early lines that were built using it.
Those models are as follows:
| I (1) | I+ (1+) | II (2) | II+ (2+) | III (3) | III+ (3+) | V-6 | 6 |
In about 1989, a year or two into doing this, I actually looked into going to the trouble of splitting my product line into 1/3-2/3 identical parts with different colored surrounds - the green-foamed SW2N in the Genesis II (and other early models) is otherwise identical to the grey-foamed SW2Y in the Genesis 20 (and other later models). I would have had to do this with three different parts, at least (a fourth being the midrange for the G III and 3+) - the ubiquitous eight-inch woofer (now my PRO 001), the less common but still needed six-inch woofer for the V-6 (now my PRO 007), and of course the ten-inch passive radiator used in the II, III, 2+, and 3+ (now my PRO 014).
I was making (selling) a couple hundred of the highest-volume of these three, the eight inch woofer, at the time. Each year. My volume for the eight inch cone - including the 2/3 that would still have been grey - was maybe three hundred a year.
| A hundred or so a year of the woofer on the left, a couple hundred of the one on the right: | |
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In order to get the appropriate cones made with green foam attached to them instead of the readily-available grey, I would have had to buy a minimum order of the 3/8" thick foam that we compress into "surround shape", since no one else would be using it. That would have been enough to make twenty thousand woofers. Genesis was using that many in well under a year, so the topic of buying the material never even came up. I would have been buying enough foam to last, what does the math say? Two hundred years. I would have had to buy a two hundred year supply of foam to make a cosmetically different version of three of my parts for one-third of their applications.
And you know what happens to polyether foam in storage.
As you can well imagine, I did not do this.
Fast forward, if you will with me, to the present. I have always made new replacements for these old, worn out (or burnt out, accidentally or otherwise) parts, so there has never been a need, as with most other old speakers, to patch them up with generic foam replacement surrounds of dubious provenance. And my current line are actually improvements in several distinct ways, while maintaining everything about the original parts that mattered.
And one of those improvements is that I use butyl rubber surrounds. Butyl was the surround material of the orgiinal precursor to all of these parts, seals better, and lasts far, far longer than polyether foam.
So, no, not only do I not sell foam surround kits for these speakers, I definitely do not sell green foam.
PS, a further bifurcation of a line of identical products would have occurred if I had tried to deal with the first-generation Epicure models in a similar fashion. They used not only blue foam, but also had blue cones. Interestingly, no one has ever asked me for either of those. I guess the green Genesis foam is "special" in just the right way.
PPS, I did ask about green butyl when I changed the cone-surround assemblies I buy to that vastly preferable material. The answer was "no".
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