I needed some new outdoor speakers and thought these looked interesting from looking through the JBL spec sheet that they could possibly work indoors as well. Because of that I thought it would be interesting to measure them with the grill off. One note about the grill is that it is extremely well built and in addition to the grill there is a thin foam insert behind the grill. I am guessing this is an additional set of weather protection to keep the moisture out of the front port (you can see the crossover when looking through the port). It seems to be a very clever way to get a ported speaker designed for outdoor use.
I have a pair of Polk (OW3 I think) on our deck and wanted to be able to play louder and have better bass on our deck/patio. We have no neighbors nearby so we can play loudly when we want. Getting good bass outdoors isn’t very easy and came across this model as well as the Control 30 and 31. I ended up getting these for around $250 each delivered and these 2 were new in box (Purchased a used one that ended up being broken and had to be refunded on as well). From the spec sheet some things looked interesting...
-continuous max spl of 112dB /short term 118dB
-Flat/even ish response
-Due to the port, good bass extension down to 43hz
-Integrated mounting hardware
-Good directivity
-Rotatable Horn for mounting horizontal
I have had one at home as well and have played it both indoors and outdoors as well. Outdoors this speaker does exactly what I hoped. When placed against a wall bass is very good with music and overall it sounds very good. I ended up with these filters that seemed to improve sound. The low shelf filter improved bass at normal listening volumes. The high pass seemed to help when bass was boosted at higher volumes. Look forward to trying Pierre’s EQ as well.
Indoors I compared it to my Revel C208 and the difference in directivity stood out the most. When playing both in mono (separately) the C208 seemed much wider. From the measurements, the only bad thing is the tweeter distortion measurements which seemed a bit surprising.
All in all happy with it. And for fun, to get an idea of the size…