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JBL is on the Vintage wagon now?


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14 hours ago, Marvel said:

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

 

Bruce,

 

Well, I guess these days are over:

1) JBL C55, image.png.9423da206d05e1de7254d6c515ecdb82.pngnot much bass, but very clean, very tight, with very low distortion.   Marvelous with 375 mid/treble driver and a good horn-lens added.  Erroneously thought to have been designed for the 70mm Todd-AO film process (see below), but actually intended for small theaters, or surround duty at best..  Stairway to Music in Oakland had one on which to listen to the LP records they sold  (stereo in the next room, with JBL 030s in C34 enclosures, also with horn loaded bass) ... many happy hours ...

 

2) JBL horn Loaded theater speaker.  These were  designed for Todd-AO, at the behest of Ampex.   Woofers were front loaded by horns, with plenty of boundary gain by virtue of the front surfaces of the boxes, and a supplemental port.

  image.png.a52e80c0125e071e8acd7d0384498011.png

 

  In the Todd-AO (and other 70mm processes before Dolby) theaters there were 5 of these units behind the screen (and a few smaller C34/C40-ish units embedded in the ceiling and behind side wall grills, for tone induced switchable, but mono, surrounds, 6 independent channels in all, front and surround).   To my very young ears, the behind the screen ones sounded squeaky clean, very powerful, and dynamic as can be, with bass that shook the concrete floor for Ben-Hur (1959 - MGM Camera 65).  They got me into the audio hobby. 

 

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Mike,

If those sit on the floor it is no wonder you have boomy bass. They were meant to be up much higher in a studio setting. Having the woofers near the floor for those is absolutely the wrong placement.

 

Bruce

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On 1/18/2018 at 7:34 PM, Marvel said:

Mike,

If those sit on the floor it is no wonder you have boomy bass. They were meant to be up much higher in a studio setting. Having the woofers near the floor for those is absolutely the wrong placement.

 

Bruce

Bruce, I was referring to the bass from the L100s. My monitors are on stands.

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Well, for $4K I hope the new L100s have  real crossovers. The originals had two caps, that's it. It was the epitome of the "boom-shriek"genre. A pity because the drivers were JBL's usual high quality. I don't know what crossovers the pro versions used but I bet they had a more elaborate design, I don't think the pro version was a rebadged L100, rather I think the L100 was a stripped-down pro version. I knew people who had L100s in the 70s and most of them took those grilles off after a few weeks.

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On ‎1‎/‎22‎/‎2018 at 3:36 AM, boom3 said:

Well, for $4K I hope the new L100s have  real crossovers. The originals had two caps, that's it. It was the epitome of the "boom-shriek"genre. A pity because the drivers were JBL's usual high quality. I don't know what crossovers the pro versions used but I bet they had a more elaborate design, I don't think the pro version was a rebadged L100, rather I think the L100 was a stripped-down pro version. I knew people who had L100s in the 70s and most of them took those grilles off after a few weeks.

 

Well, the 4310 that the L100 was the home version of was originally voiced to mimic the sound of an Altec 604E mounted inside of a 620 utility cabinet, which was the standard studio control room monitor of the day (around 1970). This was JBL's "foot-in-the-door" with studio engineers, all of whom were plenty familiar with the sound of the 604E/620 combo.

 

For all practical purposes, the original 4310/L100 were 2-way speakers. There was no low-pass filter whatsoever on the 12" woofer; it was allowed to put out audio as far up in frequency as it could, and it had strong output well past 2kHz. This wasn't much of a problem if you were sitting right in front of the speaker, but I'm sure it caused the speaker to beam like a sumbitch above 1kHz. 

 

The 5" midrange driver was added more for sales & marketing reasons than for sonic ones. JBL figured that a 12" 2-way studio monitor wouldn't be taken as seriously by recording engineers as would a 12" 3-way with a 5" midrange. Plus, adding the midrange (and it's level pot on the crossover) gave engineers more of a feeling of control over the speaker's performance. I've never heard a 4310 or L100 with the midrange and its attendant crossover components removed, but I bet it probably sounded a lot smoother than the 3-way versions that went into production. (I think around that time JBL made a home speaker based on the L100 that you could buy as a 2-way and then later add a midrange and new crossover to upgrade it to a 3-way. If it was indeed based on the L100 I would bet that it sounded better if left in the 2-way configuration.)

 

P.S.: When I bought my 4312Es (brand-new engineering samples at a price so ridiculously low that I just couldn't pass them up) Greg Timbers (JBL's chief engineer) told me that they sound best with the midrange level potentiometer turned all the way down, which shuts off the driver. I tried that and while it does sound smoother, the dome tweeter in the 4312E doesn't seem to go quite low enough without having to put just a little juice into the midrange driver. (The originals had a mini-cone tweeter that I think probably did better at its lower end than the metal dome in the 4312E.) But no combination of mid/tweeter level control settings turns that speaker into one I would trust as a primary monitor for tracking and mixing. There's just too much weird sh*t going on in the midrange. Maybe they improved that in this new L100 version; it shares nothing with my 4312Es.

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22 hours ago, hsosdrummer said:

all of whom were plenty familiar with the sound of the 604E/620 combo.

 

Hi hsosdrummer,

 

I heard a rumor from a guy at Swanson Sound Service in the San Francisco Bay Area, c. 1973, that the early 604Es that were shipped were wired out of phase (or, some would insist, with incorrect polarity).  Altec corrected this rapidly, but some engineers preferred them the "wrong" way, so they collected these for their home sound systems, but used the correctly configured ones at work, to make a more nearly correct mix.  Did you ever hear this?  Or them?

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Gary:

 

Since the 604E had a separate network it would have been a simple matter to experiment with the relative polarity of the horn and woofer and then run the speaker however it sounded best to the individual.

 

I never had a chance to hear the 604E at all, only the 604-8G in the Stonehenge III home speaker. I also heard whatever version of the 604 was used in the Mastering Labs "Super Red" speaker, the one with the additional 15" woofer. THOSE sounded huge and were impressive. But they had a crossover built by Mastering Labs and so weren't representative of how any stock 604 model would sound. 

 

The 4310/L100 stories above came to me from archives that I read and conversations with engineers that I had while I worked at Harman between 2009 and 2013.

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I've had only limited experience with JBL home speakers but every time I walk into a concert hall or nightclub and see those curved ceiling hung JBL commercial speaks, I know I'm in for a lesser listening experience. Problem is they dominate the market and are everywhere and I know of only one venue that does the proper room correction to make them sound good.

 

To my mind, people who like JBL like the beatles.

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17 hours ago, hsosdrummer said:

Gary:

 

Since the 604E had a separate network it would have been a simple matter to experiment with the relative polarity of the horn and woofer and then run the speaker however it sounded best to the individual.

 

I never had a chance to hear the 604E at all, only the 604-8G in the Stonehenge III home speaker. I also heard whatever version of the 604 was used in the Mastering Labs "Super Red" speaker, the one with the additional 15" woofer. THOSE sounded huge and were impressive. But they had a crossover built by Mastering Labs and so weren't representative of how any stock 604 model would sound. 

 

The 4310/L100 stories above came to me from archives that I read and conversations with engineers that I had while I worked at Harman between 2009 and 2013.

it looks like they came in 3 varieties.

Super reds , big reds , and little reds..

 

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-brochures-mastering-lab-132677046

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38 minutes ago, thebes said:

I've had only limited experience with JBL home speakers but every time I walk into a concert hall or nightclub and see those curved ceiling hung JBL commercial speaks, I know I'm in for a lesser listening experience. Problem is they dominate the market and are everywhere and I know of only one venue that does the proper room correction to make them sound good.

 

To my mind, people who like JBL like the beatles.

image.png.a46ef194d8a994a6259511787b03a310.png

Do you mean these?   image.png.a7d89962a68fcd8c7e8b05956c3b069f.pngThey have two 12" woofers in each unit, and are spec'd down to 46 Hz.   Then again, many rock/metal/pop recordings only go that low, in order to jack up the midrange.  This makes Norwegian Wood sound wide range.  I wonder if they should have a few subwoofers hanging around near them?  The Flying Wallendas of loudspeakers!

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Yup. Those and the longer ones or maybe . They are  usually ceiling stacked. Put out a lot of thunder, sturm und drang, but the distortion is awful.  Granted they could be overdriven, but in all venues I've heard them?

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On ‎1‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 4:35 PM, thebes said:

I've had only limited experience with JBL home speakers but every time I walk into a concert hall or nightclub and see those curved ceiling hung JBL commercial speaks, I know I'm in for a lesser listening experience. Problem is they dominate the market and are everywhere and I know of only one venue that does the proper room correction to make them sound good.

 

To my mind, people who like JBL like the beatles.

 

Don't blame the hardware for operator errors. Those large JBL Vertec arrays are a 4-way quad-amped system that requires specific Crown amplification that is running specific iterations of DSP programming, and the whole thing needs to be properly tuned for the venue. When powered and run with the specified amps and DSP, arrayed properly and properly tuned for the venue (JBL provides multi-day training sessions for all of this) Vertec systems can sound stunningly real, and can provide that sense of reality for thousands of listeners. When the speakers are improperly set up and being run by non-specified amplification and DSP it's anybody's guess as to whether or not the results will be good, but it they aren't it's certainly not JBL's fault.

 

If you went to someone's house to hear their Jubilees and found them running inadequate amplification with an incorrectly set up electronic crossover and incorrectly deployed DSP, you would rightly blame the owner for the speakers' lousy performance, and not the speakers.

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Re: Cornwalls being used for monitoring/mixing. Owen Bradley of Decca Country Music and Bradley's Barn fame (Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Brenda Lee, and more) loved and used Klipsch speakers in his studios and office (Cornwalls and the Forte). Wendy Carlos, the noted synthesizer wizard owns and uses Cornwalls. I agree, like them better than the JBL L300 or the other JBL monitors for critical listening, I even like the Heresy better for same than JBL. The bass is better on the JBL, but the Cornwall and Heresy were better on all else. 

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On 1/30/2018 at 4:53 PM, hsosdrummer said:

If you went to someone's house to hear their Jubilees and found them running inadequate amplification with an incorrectly set up electronic crossover and incorrectly deployed DSP, you would rightly blame the owner for the speakers' lousy performance, and not the speakers.

...Wish that were the case.

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6 hours ago, Kent T said:

Re: Cornwalls being used for monitoring/mixing. Owen Bradley of Decca Country Music and Bradley's Barn fame (Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Brenda Lee, and more) loved and used Klipsch speakers in his studios and office (Cornwalls and the Forte). Wendy Carlos, the noted synthesizer wizard owns and uses Cornwalls. I agree, like them better than the JBL L300 or the other JBL monitors for critical listening, I even like the Heresy better for same than JBL. The bass is better on the JBL, but the Cornwall and Heresy were better on all else. 

 

I remember hearing that one primarily country music studio used Klipschorns as monitors!

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On 1/16/2018 at 2:31 PM, jorjen said:

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

 

Here yea go Jordan, these's are just down the road from you.

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-JBL-Century-Model-L100-Speakers-Nice-Pair/273051613984?hash=item3f9324fb20:g:3qAAAOSww-Bac-c7

 

They're just looking for a new bookshelf to make happy again.

 

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On 1/24/2018 at 7:49 PM, hsosdrummer said:

 

Well, the 4310 that the L100 was the home version of was originally voiced to mimic the sound of an Altec 604E mounted inside of a 620 utility cabinet, which was the standard studio control room monitor of the day (around 1970). This was JBL's "foot-in-the-door" with studio engineers, all of whom were plenty familiar with the sound of the 604E/620 combo.

 

For all practical purposes, the original 4310/L100 were 2-way speakers. There was no low-pass filter whatsoever on the 12" woofer; it was allowed to put out audio as far up in frequency as it could, and it had strong output well past 2kHz. This wasn't much of a problem if you were sitting right in front of the speaker, but I'm sure it caused the speaker to beam like a sumbitch above 1kHz. 

 

The 5" midrange driver was added more for sales & marketing reasons than for sonic ones. JBL figured that a 12" 2-way studio monitor wouldn't be taken as seriously by recording engineers as would a 12" 3-way with a 5" midrange. Plus, adding the midrange (and it's level pot on the crossover) gave engineers more of a feeling of control over the speaker's performance. I've never heard a 4310 or L100 with the midrange and its attendant crossover components removed, but I bet it probably sounded a lot smoother than the 3-way versions that went into production. (I think around that time JBL made a home speaker based on the L100 that you could buy as a 2-way and then later add a midrange and new crossover to upgrade it to a 3-way. If it was indeed based on the L100 I would bet that it sounded better if left in the 2-way configuration.)

 

P.S.: When I bought my 4312Es (brand-new engineering samples at a price so ridiculously low that I just couldn't pass them up) Greg Timbers (JBL's chief engineer) told me that they sound best with the midrange level potentiometer turned all the way down, which shuts off the driver. I tried that and while it does sound smoother, the dome tweeter in the 4312E doesn't seem to go quite low enough without having to put just a little juice into the midrange driver. (The originals had a mini-cone tweeter that I think probably did better at its lower end than the metal dome in the 4312E.) But no combination of mid/tweeter level control settings turns that speaker into one I would trust as a primary monitor for tracking and mixing. There's just too much weird sh*t going on in the midrange. Maybe they improved that in this new L100 version; it shares nothing with my 4312Es.

Tissue in the tweeter works great too, wait, that's Yamaha 

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