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JBL HDI-1600 Spinorama and Measurements

napilopez

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The more I measure speakers in my new backyard, the more I realize how lucky I was to have started measuring speakers indoors in my old place with high ceilings.

It was so easy! Outdoors I have to deal with rain, the cold, the wind, a crazy high NYC noise floor. I tried to measure this speaker three times until I finally got usable data. It was super windy and a tree branch almost fell on my head. But I did it, for science.

JBL HDI measure 2.jpg


No sound impressions in this post other than to say the speaker sounds real nice, I'll leave that for after my review. Obviously this a speaker Amir already reviewed, and I'd seen that data, so I couldn't go into its sound completely unbiased by measurements.

The spin:
HDI-1600 Spinorama.png

Mostly great stuff. Scary looking tweeter resonance if you have very high hearing, but I can still hear 19Hz and haven't found it to bother me. The lower mids are slightly scooped relative to other frequencies. The worst thing is the narrow directivity mismatch in the ERDI.

Some notes:
  • I measured the speaker from higher than I have in the past, and I did something unusual for this spin: the horizontal data is gated at 10 ms, but the vertical data is gated at the 6.5ms I've used in the pass. So there's more resolution than usual.
  • As always, I measure from 1m rather than the 2m of the standard, but as we'll see, this doesn't make a very big difference for bookshelf speakers.
  • I've decided to include the Horizontal component of the ERDI right in the spin (the yellow dotted curve), in order to have an at-a-glance view of soundstage performance. Let me know if you think this makes the spin too busy, but I think it's the most useful single-curve metric for soundstage performance. It also lets you surmise in this case that the jaggedness in the ERDI is purely from the vertical component.
This matches Amir's spin quite well, at a glance, except for the ERDI, which looks a lot worse on mine.

1616805181562.png


However, recall that review was made before Klippel addressed the faulty ERDI calculation. This is one of those cases where it clearly does matter to do it the right way. Recomputing Amir's spin from his provided data, we get:

HDI ASR Spin Corrected.png


Now overlapping my measurements (solid) and amir's (dotted):

HDI Spin Compared.png


And the correlation is excellent! Though the bass is a little different as always.

source.gif


Here are the horizontal ER components:
HDI Horizontal ER.png


Note that off-axis bass above is simulated by vituixcad based on the on-axis bass splice, so the data there is not too reliable.

Here's the full horizontal data from 0-90, sans bass splice:

HDI Horizontal.png


Normalized:
HDI-1600 Normalized Horizontal SPL.png

Horizontal Polar normalized:
1616808259279.png


Not Normalized:
1616808304878.png


Here are the vertical ER components, the Ceiling and Floor bounce:
HDI Vertical ER.png


You can clearly see where the blip in the ERDI comes from. But better that thes issues be very narrow than widespread, so I'd still classify this as significantly better than most non-coaxials.

The vertical listening window is solid, but it'sdefinitely better to be above the tweeter axis than below it (good, as that's probably more realistic in most setups, especially if you have low stands).

HDI Vertical LW.png


The 'squiggles' in the midbass are artefacts of turning the speaker on its side.

Vertical polar normalized:
1616808421584.png

Not-normalized:
1616808450189.png

Lastly, the Woofer and port measurements:
HDI W P.png


The port noise isn't too loud thankfully.

P.S.

If you want to see how extremely janky my current measurement rig is, this is what I was working with:

JBL HDI measure.jpg


Yes, it was about as precarious as it looks. Yes, I'm trying to figure out something better =] But you can see why I have no interest in trying to measure tower speakers :D

In case youre wondering why I didn't move the boxes/stand all the way to the edge of the table, it's because the table is too flimsy and it would have definitely all have toppled over. The battery pack I'm using is essentially a counterweight for the whole thing. I need a more sturdy table lol, but this one came with the yard.

Luckily this was enough clearance to keep reflections from being too probelmatic, although there admittedly is some messiness in the verticals because of it.

Anyway, I hope this is inspiration to anyone who thinks they can't take measurements because it'd be too janky. Janky can work!
 
Last edited:

richard12511

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The more I measure speakers in my new backyard, the more I realize how lucky I was to have started measuring speakers indoors in my old place with high ceilings.

It was so easy! Outdoors I have to deal with rain, the cold, the wind, a crazy high NYC noise floor. I tried to measure this speaker three times until I finally got usable data. It was super windy and a tree branch almost fell on my head. But I did it, for science.

View attachment 120573

No sound impressions in this post other than to say the speaker sounds real nice, I'll leave that for after my review. Obviously this a speaker Amir already reviewed, and I'd seen that data, so I couldn't go into its sound completely unbiased by measurements.

The spin:
View attachment 120546
Mostly great stuff. Scary looking tweeter resonance if you have very high hearing, but I can still hear 19Hz and haven't found it to bother me. The lower mids are slightly scooped relative to other frequencies. The worst thing is the narrow directivity mismatch in the ERDI.

Some notes:
  • I measured the speaker from higher than I have in the past, and I did something unusual for this spin: the horizontal data is gated at 10 ms, but the vertical data is gated at the 6.5ms I've used in the pass. So there's more resolution than usual.
  • As always, I measure from 1m rather than the 2m of the standard, but as we'll see, this doesn't make a very big difference for bookshelf speakers.
  • I've decided to include the Horizontal component of the ERDI right in the spin (the yellow dotted curve), in order to have an at-a-glance view of soundstage performance. Let me know if you think this makes the spin too busy, but I think it's the most useful single-curve metric for soundstage performance. It also lets you surmise in this case that the jaggedness in the ERDI is purely from the vertical component.
This matches Amir's spin quite well, at a glance, except for the ERDI, which looks a lot worse on mine.

View attachment 120549

However, recall that review was made before Klippel addressed the faulty ERDI calculation. This is one of those cases where it clearly does matter to do it the right way. Recomputing Amir's spin from his provided data, we get:

View attachment 120551

Now overlapping my measurements (solid) and amir's (dotted):

View attachment 120555

And the correlation is excellent! Though the bass is a little different as always.

source.gif


Here are the horizontal ER components:
View attachment 120560

Note that off-axis bass iabove s simulated by vituixcad based off of the on-axis bass splice, so some of the data there is not too reliable.

Here's the full data from 0-90:

View attachment 120561

Normalized:
View attachment 120564

Horizontal Polar normalized:
View attachment 120566


Not Normalized:
View attachment 120567


Here are the vertical ER components, the Ceiling and Floor bounce:
View attachment 120562

You can clearly see where the blip in the ERDI comes from. But better that thes issues be very narrow than widespread, so I'd still classify this as significantly better than most non-coaxials.

The vertical listening window is solid, but it'sdefinitely better to be above the tweeter axis than below it (good, as that's probably more realistic in most setups, especially if you have low stands).

View attachment 120563

The 'squiggles' in the midbass are artefacts of turning the speaker on its side.

Vertical polar normalized:
View attachment 120568

Not-normalized:
View attachment 120569

Lastly, the Woofer and port measurements:
View attachment 120570

The port noise isn't too loud thankfully.

P.S.

If you want to see how extremely janky my current measurement rig is, this is what I was working with:

View attachment 120571

Yes, it was about as precarious as it looks. Yes, I'm trying to figure out something better =] But you can see why I have no interest in trying to measure tower speakers :D

In case youre wondering why I didn't move the boxes all the way to the edge of the table, it's because it would definitely all have toppled over. The battery pack I'm using is essentially a counterweight for the whole thing. I need a more sturdy table lol, but this one came with the yard.

Luckily this was enough clearance to keep reflections from being too probelmatic, although there is some messiness in the verticals because of it.

Anyway, I hope this is inspiration to anyone who thinks they can't take measurements because it'd be too janky. Janky can work!

Man, really cool idea with adding the Horizontal DI as a dotted line. What a super simple way to "mostly" address the biggest(imo) problem with the CEA-2034 spec, and it goes a long way towards making a single graph that really does come close to telling the entire story. I don't think it makes it too busy at all, and now I'm just wishing it was a part of the official spec.
 
OP
N

napilopez

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Man, really cool idea with adding the Horizontal DI as a dotted line. What a super simple way to "mostly" address the biggest(imo) problem with the CEA-2034 spec, and it goes a long way towards making a single graph that really does come close to telling the entire story. I don't think it makes it too busy at all, and now I'm just wishing it was a part of the official spec.

Good to know! Harman actually did something similar when they sent me the spin for the JBL L82, including the horizontal power response DI.

1616822773690.png

I personally prefer using ERDI, but in any case, it was nice to see a bit more priority for horizontal data. I don't want to deviate for the standard too much, but it is really nice to have that last bit of very relevant data in the graph. It even indirectly helps see what the vertical contribution is to the ERDI, too, as that's basically the difference between the horizontal DI and the ERDI.

On another note, after revisiting some of my old measurements and playing around with the bass summations a bit, I think I'm arriving at a methodology for nearfield summations that gets closer to NFS results. A small tweak to how I did the bass summation (adjusting the delay between measurements) gets the on-axis rolloff for the HDI-1600 closer, although there's sometimes still a bit of a 'knee' in the NFS data that I don't get.

HDI OA Tweak.png


Well, I suppose I can't ask for much better than that, given the different setups. Still, I'm always looking to see what small improvements I can make. It is nice to have such reliable data to compare to =] I'm quite lucky to have started taking measurements just a little before Amir got the NFS (and now Erin too)!
 
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napilopez

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Oh, also I haven't done a specific PIR measurement from my LP, but I did do a quick full range MMM while the speaker was crossed with the KEF KC62 sub.

HDI PIR stuff.png


Note: This was with both speakers firing, at 7ish feet away, and I'd set a narrow +4dB filter at ~12khz because I thought the speakers were missing a little sparkle (I still have good hearing beyond 10kHz, thankfully).

Decent match in my room, at least. I could've sworn I had some in-room MMMs of individual speakers sans the sub but can't seem to find them.
 
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napilopez

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@pierre @Maiky76 could I bother you to score this one? Given the relatively close agreement between my measurements and amirs I'm just curious to see how much the preference score deviates from the anechoic result due to the differences that are there (bass contour, a few small resonances, resolution).
 

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Maiky76

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@pierre @Maiky76 could I bother you to score this one? Given the relatively close agreement between my measurements and amirs I'm just curious to see how much the preference score deviates from the anechoic result due to the differences that are there (bass contour, a few small resonances, resolution).

There you go:

Score 5.7
Score sub: 7.6

JBL HDI-1600 NL NO EQ spinorama.png
 

MoreWatts

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FYI, in the USA, the JBL HDI speaker line is on sale for 30% off currently. See Crutchfield, for examples.
 

mikhailf

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FYI, in the USA, the JBL HDI speaker line is on sale for 30% off currently. See Crutchfield, for examples.
Thank you, this is why I am looking to replace M16 surround speakers while I am within the return window and HDI is on sale. I just got hooked on HDI-3800 - loving them.
 
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