I needed a brand new pair of Genelec 8030C for a remote picture editing bay I was setting up to accommodate a client. I've been using the 8030s in post-production for over 15 years and they're my goto speakers. Many reasons for that, but what I want to emphasize in this review is the outstanding customer service Sweetwater provided.
First of all, I decided to pull the plug on the purchase pretty late in the day in LA. To my surprise, someone picked up the phone at Sweetwater. This was Thursday and I needed the speakers by Monday afternoon at the latest. Michael checked stock and assured me that the speakers would 100% go out first thing Friday am. I've been burned before by other vendors, so was skeptical, but having no choice, I purchased the speakers. I woke up Friday morning to find an invoice with tracking info attached in my inbox. Usually I have to chase this info down. Speakers not only arrived as promised, but I received a call from Sweetwater to make sure I got them in time and that everything was ok with the order. This kind of customer service is literally unheard of these days. Usually you have to chase the vendors down and get passed from one rep to another having to explain your situation multiple times. Sweetwater is 100% going to be my goto vendor for all my audio needs! Thank you!

I had been a user of YAMAHA 8-inch monitors for 14 years (from the old model HS-80 to the current HS-8). Now I upgrade to these compact GENELEC 8030Cs. I have to say, the improvement is simply huge and astonishing. (I am not saying HS8 is not good; it is in fact unfair to compare them considering the price difference.) I noticed several things immediately:

1. The sound field is much wider and extremely accurate. My YAMAHA HS8s create a stereo sound field which is nice, but you can feel that the main vocal parts or solo instruments are locked within the central area and somewhat far from you. But via 8030c, these parts are larger, clearer, closer to my ears, and really showing their shapes and richness. I can also catch more small percussion parts and locate their exact positions in the wide field easily.

2. The sweet spot is large. I am not so happy with HS8's sweet spot and if you are 3 or 5 feet away from the central position, you do feel the decay of sound quality. But these 8030Cs keep a large sweet spot; I can even stand on the side (not back, of course) of them and still enjoy the sound. It is amazing!

3. The sound is not only wider and with more details, but STRONGER. It shows more muscle than HS8, I would say. If you go back from 8030c to HS8, you would feel the sound is somewhat soft, lacking energy and density. I guess it partially comes from the fact that these speakers more focus on the lower-middle range, while HS8, to my ear, more focuses on upper-middle, with slightly exaggerated high frequencies. Considering their size difference, the performance is stunning.

4. This is probably a con for some people, 8030c has a tight bass. For a 5-inch woofer, I believe its performance is already very good; and its bass is in fact with high quality. But you should not expect that they shake your windows with deep and boomy bass. I heard that a subwoofer will improve the situation substantially; I will try it in the future.

Overall, a fantastic speaker. The sound is really amazing and the size is truly compact. I also personally feel the sound is quite enjoyable - not so colorized and sweet, but honest and vigorous.

These are my first powered monitors. I wasn't able to test them out before hand, but did some research and decided one these. Wow! Just blown away with how good they sound. I would highly recommend them. I only use them for nearfield listening with a subwoofer, so not sure how well they will do at longer distances, but they are amazing.

I never got the Genelec haterade, so having said that you already know this is gonna be a positive review.
I've noticed guitar guys (as in people who play or mix guitar-centric music) tend to not love Genelecs, but that's not me.

I'll say I'm hard-pressed to find another active 5" monitor of this quality in this price range. I owned a pair of HEDD Type 05 (Mk1) for four years, and I'd say the Genelecs are more accurate over all, particularly in the bottom end, but the HEDD's have a nicer and smoother top end. The latter do have narrower vertical dispersion, although that is by design (so I was told by their designer Klaus Heinz).

I remember people used to say Genelecs flatter the sound, but that's not what I hear. These things reveal minor unpleasantness in recordings I always thought sounded great, particularly older ones. The bass repro is very good for a 5" woofer, and in my small room it suffices, but it does not defy the laws of physics.
The sweet spot is fairly large and the sound is surprisingly consistent anywhere in the room. However, I will say that they do need to be pushed a bit, at very low volumes their performance isn't quite as good. But build quality is literally second to none, nothing else feels this solid.

Of lesser importance, but something to consider, is that I really like Genelec as a company, they do things the right way, like their efforts to make their products and manufacturing process more sustainable. Their stuff is still made in Finland, whereas key competitors (Focal, Dynaudio, ADAM) have started to manufacture certain product lines in China. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I do admire Genelec for not succumbing to the spreadsheet warriors and keeping everything in-house.

The 8030's are not perfect and certainly pricy, but worth the money, if you ask me. Even if I move to a bigger room with different monitor needs, I doubt I'd get rid of these. They feel like things you just keep in the family for generations to come.

If you're on the fence about investing in a higher end set of speakers such as these, I would go ahead and pull the trigger! Lovely little set of speakers, have them paired with a 10 inch sub for a full range system for mixing in my home studio. Imaging is really nice with a wide sweet spot and I've left the dip switches in their default positions (My room is pretty well treated) would recommend these to anyone moving up in the world of monitors and will definitely consider Genelec for any future monitoring in my career!

Based on conversations with my sales engineer, he suggested that I had outgrown my monitors. I of course did not want to believe him.
I live 5 minutes from Sweetwater so whenever I complete a mix I take it in and listen to it with my sales guy on the array of monitors in their sound room.
The Genelecs have always sounded better to me than any of the other brands. Very smooth, balanced.
Well this last mix I struggled with, and when we listened to it on the Genelecs I was able to hear exactly what was wrong.
That made my reluctance to buy new monitors evaporate.
Now that they are in my home studio I am hearing things when I mix that I have never heard before.
While mixing as an amateur is still quite challenging, these monitors have pushed my results way past anything I would have imagined and I haven't even
Gotten to the point of adjusting the dip switches on the back to compensate for room frequencies.
If they get better than what they are now it will just be a bonus, cause they are already awesome.
We always want to spend our money on guitars, keyboards, etc, instead of studio infrastructure, but if you're serious about your recording….
Well, you get the idea.

These Genelec 8030C speakers are an amazing steal for the price, you will be hard pressed to find a better sounding speaker well above the asking price, truly a hidden gem! The Genelec 8030C's remind me of my MK Sound 950 LCR THX speakers in the tonal quality, accuracy, clarity, detail and true sounding speakers.

The thing is the Genelecs are better, maybe it's the metal dome tweeter that gives music and voices more liveliness. I have always prefered soft dome tweeters and actually this is my first speaker with a metal dome tweeter and it won't be my last if they can sound this good.

I'm running the Black Lion Revolution 2x2 Audio Interface recommended by Joseph to clean up and the signal, ordinally I was going to wire the Genelecs directly to my PC's 3.5mm outputs, so glad Joseph convinced me to feed these bad boys a pristine signal.

The moment I got 8030c's playing with my selected source material, it put a huge smile on my face and I can totally see myself buying three more to add to a 5.1 setup when the budget allows.

A 5.1 8030C setup is absolutely in my future.

I'm a retired mastering engineer of some 30 years. I used a pair of little 1029A's as front channels in my home theater for over 20 years! Finally one had a power supply go bad, so ordered a pair of 8030's. They are even smoother and quieter than the 1029A's! Overkill? Maybe. But I love Genelec!

Haven't bought anything from Sweetwater in many years. Received a call from a salesperson asking if he could answer any questions, along with a delivery estimate. You don't get that kind of followup on the web very often. Great job Sweetwater! Overall a great experience! Thanks All!

I fell in love with these Finnish wonders back in the early 1990s. After auditioning the entire stock of my local music store I outfitted my studio with 2 of the 5" cubes, which I used as near fields. The imaging and overall tonal transparency was far above most of the less expensive units, and marginally superior to equivalently priced self-powered models - yet still superior in my mind. I unsheathed my Visa card and never looked back.

Now here we are in the 2020s. We relocated 5 years ago, and in addition, my day job became a substantial monopolizer of my time, so my home studio went dormant, and when we packed all my gear up for transport, I realized it was the first time my Genelecs (and everything in my racks) had been unplugged in 25+ years (powered down of course).

When we got to the new digs I began to reassemble my home studio in the room we set aside for that and it was at that point that I realized all the years of dust and grime that had collected on the rear of the speakers also suggested that all the internal components were similarly old - particularly the electrolytics. So I recapped them, and stared at them on my bench. Several of my synths were now considered "classics" (hard to imagine I bought everything new) which is ironic because I wound up adding ROMs to the digital synths to recreate "Vintage Synths." (Does that make the Roland "Vintage Synth" ROMs an archeological anomaly?)

As our new location and our situation is more conducive to music making - it occurred to me I should possibly expect equipment failures. In addition, over the past 25 years, we have begun to expect that any self-respecting studio would at least have 5.1 capability (not sure I need that, but hey, are we not gear junkies?)

So I bought the package offered here consisting of 2 5" modern Genelecs and a sub. I have literally just got the Genelecs on the wall.

Sonically - they are near identical (to my ear) to my old 5" pair. And yes, everything would EQ better and phasing wouldn't be a challenge if they were not on a wall, but we live with the limitations we have. (I guess I will need a much bigger space for my studio in my next house...). And yes, I still need one more to give me true 5.1 capability, but for now, I'm stereo.

These modern Genelecs have user controls to adjust EQ/Phase for speaker location (phasing is on the sub, not the near fields).

The Genelec sound is still my favorite aspect. However, it bears mentioning that I absolutely love something they call ISS - which will auto-power-up/down the speakers without having to hit a power switch anywhere. With the Genelecs mounted (via the Genelec mount) on a wall behind my computer/mixing console - reaching back to manually power on my old 5" cubes would have been cumbersome as I currently have no way to sequence power up/down to the rest of my gear. The new Genelecs have no difficulty recognizing the "pop" of power being cycled and keep themselves turned off until an actual signal arrives. Thus, they can be left powered on 100% of the time.

Sounds Good
Very Kind Engineer
From South Korea

Clear sound and deep basss

Outstanding speakers! I used to own the Dynaudio BM6A and the BM6A II, these Genelecs are different ball game in every sector. You forget you are listening to speakers that's how 'true' they are, near perfect reproduction of sound. Recommend!

I've had these for about a year now and would like to say that I'm extremely happy with my purchase. I use them in a 9'x11' room but feel totally confident that they would be useful in a much larger setting with other monitors to choose from. The overall sound is clean, uncolored, crisp and detailed. They will provide a very sound and equal break from the headphones when you desire it. I am super impressed with the build quality and I feel sure that they are built to last!