|
Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
|
|
|
Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
|
A friend invited me over to help him set up and listen to his new monitors - in his basement studio.
Looks: Scale - about the same as my MMG's face on - maybe a little wider. Not that deep for a tall speaker - Yes, you will never mistake them for room dividers. Claim to be 1" MDF - heavy enough to not dispute this. Actually slightly understated - though the Image Control Waveguide is a glossy plastic - but in a good way - rapped on the curved part with a knuckle it felt solid and secure. In this install they will eventually be behind a thin fabric panel. We didn't instal the spikes as the will be moved a bit - for now set them on 24" carpet squares so they could be moved around easily.
These are biamplified loudspeakers only - and JBL wants you to use their "preprogrammed" DSP settings. This is accomplished by them shipping with Crown iTech DSP power amplifiers. You can use an external processor (BSS - another Harmon company) and your own power amplifiers. I think a stack of McIntosh Amps might look excellent next to these loudspeakers! (Later I might come back and test each driver individually - as well as look at the DSP settings in the Amplifier.)
We got the loudspeakers in place and amps hooked up - the correct DSP program set (it was there when the amps turned on.) Speakers about 8 feet apart and 9 feet from the listing chair. Room is about 15 x 22D x 9H Threw a little band limited pink noise at them to check the balance and level of each speaker. Toed in each speaker bit by bit until the side reflection dip disappeared (about a 15 degree toe in is all that was required. Then I sent the noise signal to both speakers simultaneously to check channel balance. The crossover is suppose to be around 800 Hz. There was absolutely no evidence in the measurements - Pink noise was a flat +1.5 - 2.2dB from 300Hz to 4KHz in 1/3 octaves.
More impressively the speakers pulled what this friend calls a "Magnepan". They completely disappeared as sound sources and the noise was coming from a phantom loudspeaker about 2 feet behind the the plain of the loudspeakers. He was totally stoked. While he was going for his music selections, I did a quick look at the low end with pink noise and there was solid energy at 25Hz - with output dropping off below that. - I suspect the DSP is limiting this as much as the cabinet.
Some familiar recordings were routed through the mixer. Of note, Hotel California - Live - HFO showed as good a bottom frequency imaging as I have heard without subwoofers. And the speakers disappeared - behaving like a WATT mini-monitor. "Cherokee" off of Harry James Big Band (King James Version) has some overlayed instruments that sometime get lost - an again, any concern about the lowish acoustic crossover were put to rest.
It was very hard to believe this is a 15" two way loudspeaker. It was easy to believe this is a $20K super loudspeaker system.
Worth a listen - unfortunately I don't know where you'd find this loudspeaker (set up correctly) to listen to - not exactly likely to see in Guitar Center.
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Topic - First listen: Sitting down with the JBL M2 reference monitors - BigguyinATL 15:15:16 03/31/14 (3)
- What would be really interesting - comparison to a more traditional "audiophile"... - carcass93 12:08:29 04/01/14 (1)
- RE: What would be really interesting - comparison to a more traditional "audiophile"... - BigguyinATL 13:02:43 04/01/14 (0)
- What is missing... - mkuller 15:36:37 03/31/14 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]