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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.
Three most important things in Audio reproduction: Keep the noise levels low, the power high and the room diffuse.
Follow Ups:
... system, with $20K sunk into speakers and amps. What we already know - these JBLs won't win on WAF factor alone :-)
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 s(h?)oked
$500 monitors will accomplish that, with some entry level integrated.
Granted - this guy is not a discerning a listener for stereo reproduction - after all he is a musician - bass guitar and drummer. So in most cases he is very happy with headphones on. He built his basement studio for recording but not producing and remixing, so that is the part he has asked my assistance on. We are going to place a DAW at the "sweetspot" and set him up for a full 5.1 Mix.
BTW These sounded better than $500 Monitors. His home theater up stairs is Def Tech system and they definately do not dissapear. He came listening to my somewhat upgraded Magnepan system about a year ago and he "discovered" there was some useful entertainment from a great sound reproduction system. Though he acknowledges 99.999% of the people that listen to the stuff that he records do it through buds and bluetooth boxes.
This is actually interesting topic in general for this board, as my friend believes there actually be a coming resurgence in Hi-Fi.
Three most important things in Audio reproduction: Keep the noise levels low, the power high and the room diffuse.
...these
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