Well it had to happen eventually. You know that moment in time where there is a fork in the road ? Happened to me this past weekend...
I will keep it short here (for now) and just hit the highlights. A longer story is posted over at the Lansing Heritage site if you wanna get all technical with JBL model numbers and such. The basic plot is this - a JBL pro Cinema system came up for sale near me (4670) . It uses a 4" titanium compression driver (30 freaking pounds all by itself!) hooked to a small-ish horn, and dual 15" drivers in a 150lb ported cabinet. All in it's about 200 back breaking lbs per side. There are no passive crossover components to be found anywhere. It's as pure as pure gets. It was designed to power small to medium theaters and I'd bet many of us have heard these over the years.
So, with the help of an audio enabler friend (we all need one of those, right?), we wrestled it back to his treated basement man-cave space and set about hooking it up. I cobbled together enough cables, an old AudioArts electronic crossover, a Yamaha 31-band Pro EQ and an old ATX 8-channel 50-watt "whole house" amp. It looked like like hell and we had some hiss with nothing playing.
Then we started playing music....holy !@##$$#@
Over the next 4 hours we tweaked eq and xover settings until we had it "there". Then we proceeded to throw music at it, trying to see if there was anything it couldn't do. We failed. We broke out into belly laughs so many times our sides hurt. This was A M A Z I N G audio reproduction, with crappy cables, background hiss and looks that even the most tolerant wife would laugh out of the living room. Yet there we were...seriously rethinking many of our recent speaker and gear choices.
You probably don't believe me and that's OK. But those that might own large Altecs or other pro-level horn systems know what I am talking about here. The sense of dynamics and sheer impact (I have NEVER heard a kick drum hit like these do) just totally blows away any "tall skinny audiophile" speaker I've ever heard. And I'll put my Salon 2's on that list as well.
I'm ruined. I need therapy. Can I get an AMEN ?
:-)
jblnut
I will keep it short here (for now) and just hit the highlights. A longer story is posted over at the Lansing Heritage site if you wanna get all technical with JBL model numbers and such. The basic plot is this - a JBL pro Cinema system came up for sale near me (4670) . It uses a 4" titanium compression driver (30 freaking pounds all by itself!) hooked to a small-ish horn, and dual 15" drivers in a 150lb ported cabinet. All in it's about 200 back breaking lbs per side. There are no passive crossover components to be found anywhere. It's as pure as pure gets. It was designed to power small to medium theaters and I'd bet many of us have heard these over the years.
So, with the help of an audio enabler friend (we all need one of those, right?), we wrestled it back to his treated basement man-cave space and set about hooking it up. I cobbled together enough cables, an old AudioArts electronic crossover, a Yamaha 31-band Pro EQ and an old ATX 8-channel 50-watt "whole house" amp. It looked like like hell and we had some hiss with nothing playing.
Then we started playing music....holy !@##$$#@
Over the next 4 hours we tweaked eq and xover settings until we had it "there". Then we proceeded to throw music at it, trying to see if there was anything it couldn't do. We failed. We broke out into belly laughs so many times our sides hurt. This was A M A Z I N G audio reproduction, with crappy cables, background hiss and looks that even the most tolerant wife would laugh out of the living room. Yet there we were...seriously rethinking many of our recent speaker and gear choices.
You probably don't believe me and that's OK. But those that might own large Altecs or other pro-level horn systems know what I am talking about here. The sense of dynamics and sheer impact (I have NEVER heard a kick drum hit like these do) just totally blows away any "tall skinny audiophile" speaker I've ever heard. And I'll put my Salon 2's on that list as well.
I'm ruined. I need therapy. Can I get an AMEN ?
:-)
jblnut
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