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JBL is on the Vintage wagon now?


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2 hours ago, jimjimbo said:

$4K for L100's??  Trust me, they're not that good.

 

My 4311s cost $329 each in 1971-72. The cost of inflation now makes that a tad over $2k each. The 4311 was the pro version of the L100. I still use mine. They have more bass than a pair of Heresy speakers.

 

Bruce

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1 hour ago, Grizzog said:

JBL is bringing back a couple vintage speakers. ...they will have a tough time coming up with new designs (at least for their synthesis line) since they fired all their top engineers that had been there for 40+ years.


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Bean counters win, quality looses.

JJK

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On ‎1‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 12:31 PM, jorjen said:

Bring back the L300 Summit and then they would be onto something. Cost aside though I am sure.

 

When I was a retail audio salesman back between 1977 and 1981 our store had L300s and Cornwalls in the same demo room. The Cornwalls bested  the L300s in all musical attributes (dynamic impact, freedom from coloration, lack of distortion, realistic soundstaging) no matter what kind of music you played through them and no matter the volume at which you played them (the L300 was particularly weak when playing orchestral music at lower volumes). The comparison wasn't even close.

 

I couldn't make the same direct comparison between the L100s and Heresys because the L100s were in another demo room, but the Heresys blew-away the L166 and L65 Jubal in every attribute except bass extension. And since the Jubal cost what a Cornwall cost, a dollar-for-dollar comparison was particularly devastating for JBL.

 

I currently own a pair of JBL 4312E studio monitors and if these new L100s sound anything like them, they're not even worth a serious listen. (I finally removed the 4312Es from my studio about 8 months ago because they were so tonally colored, especially throughout the midrange, that I simply couldn't trust that they were telling me what I was really putting on my recordings. Mixing and mastering on my 1980s vintage Cornwall IIs has proven to be much more successful — the mixes I create using the CWs translate extremely well to just about any other type of device: small 2-channel stereos, Bluetooth speakers, car stereos and home theater systems.)

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1 hour ago, hsosdrummer said:

 

When I was a retail audio salesman back between 1977 and 1981 our store had L300s and Cornwalls in the same demo room. The Cornwalls bested  the L300s in all musical attributes (dynamic impact, freedom from coloration, lack of distortion, realistic soundstaging) no matter what kind of music you played through them and no matter the volume at which you played them (the L300 was particularly weak when playing orchestral music at lower volumes). The comparison wasn't even close.

 

I couldn't make the same direct comparison between the L100s and Heresys because the L100s were in another demo room, but the Heresys blew-away the L166 and L65 Jubal in every attribute except bass extension. And since the Jubal cost what a Cornwall cost, a dollar-for-dollar comparison was particularly devastating for JBL.

 

I currently own a pair of JBL 4312E studio monitors and if these new L100s sound anything like them, they're not even worth a serious listen. (I finally removed the 4312Es from my studio about 8 months ago because they were so tonally colored, especially throughout the midrange, that I simply couldn't trust that they were telling me what I was really putting on my recordings. Mixing and mastering on my 1980s vintage Cornwall IIs has proven to be much more successful — the mixes I create using the CWs translate extremely well to just about any other type of device: small 2-channel stereos, Bluetooth speakers, car stereos and home theater systems.)

 

That Corwall mixing is very interesting.

JJK

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On 1/16/2018 at 3:26 PM, Marvel said:

 

My 4311s cost $329 each in 1971-72. The cost of inflation now makes that a tad over $2k each. The 4311 was the pro version of the L100. I still use mine. They have more bass than a pair of Heresy speakers.

 

Bruce

 

I thought the 4310 was the pro version of the L100, and the 4311 was an improvement  --- unless they kept changing the L100, without changing the model number.   They used the 4311 at the Different Fur Trading Company [San Francisco recording studio] in the Moog Synthesizer room.  They were less efficient than the Heresy, I think.

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Gary,

Yes, it was the 4310., but both series changed over time.The main problem for both is the crossover.

 

And I would agree on the efficiency issue, too. When I got my Heresy IIs, at first hearing I thought they sounded vey similar, but the Heresy was much louder. Well, we know that with the higher efficieny, the distortion goes down. The JBL is all direct radiator based. If I had the money, I would get the Jantzen crossover for them, to have an actual crossover that corrects the level mismatch and phase issues.

 

I  still like them, warts and all.

 

Bruce

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