JBL Control 29AV-1 Review (PA/Outdoor Speaker)

[milan616]

I haven't had fried clams in 2 years. Is that just a new england thing?

If you can't find fried clams anywhere near Somerville you gotta be actively blocking them out lol!

Nice, I'm in Arlington, just a town over!

Former Burlington-ite here!

 

[Kachda]

Is this enough beer?
View attachment 153989

I’m in seattle for the next 2 weeks and woukd like an invitation to the party please

 

[DualTriode]

Hello,

It looks like the rule rather than the exception, bass reflex ports are more interference than they are worth.

Drive the bung in the hole and move on.

Get a sub.

Thanks DT

 

[AdamG]

@amirm, you are a perpetual test and evaluate Machine! Rust Never Sleeps and apparently either do you!

 

[Andreas007]

Amir, why without grill?
Any reason behind that? I guess most people will leave the grill on for protection, especially outdoors.

 

[imagidominc]

What da panther do

 

[amirm]

Amir, why without grill?
Any reason behind that? I guess most people will leave the grill on for protection, especially outdoors.

If you have protected environment you can opt to use it without grill. It doesn't provide a ton of protection anyway from the elements. Also, good to see the pure performance of the speaker without the interference from the grill.

 

[amirm]

What da panther do

He is trying for different roles until he settles on one....

 

[mathman]

At the first glance I mistook the fire fighter panther for a wizard and thought the hose was his wand ^^'
Got me excited for some JBL magic ...

 

[Laserjock]

At the first glance I mistook the fire fighter panther for a wizard and thought the hose was his wand ^^'
Got me excited for some JBL magic ...

Lol! Exactly what I thought until you said and I zoomed in.
Mostly on the site with my phone

 

[Dj7675]

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…

 

[RobL]

I have a couple of Control 30’s in my shop..I guess they’re the 3-way version of these (with a 5”coaxial mid/1” compression driver). To be honest, I prefer the sound of the PSB CS1000’s that are on my deck over my shop’s JBL’s. The JBL’s will take much more power and play extremely loud if asked, but the PSB’s just seem have a more pleasant character to them…idk, more “refined” maybe? I like them enough that I bought another pair for my cottage.

edit: I found some NRC measurements for the CS1000 here. They appear to measure pretty well, which makes me feel better about my subjective opinion

 

[MCH]

Thanks. How many people have speakers hooked up outside? Maybe I'm just an oddball, but appears to be quite uncommon IMO.

I do and i think it is a great thing to have.

 

[amirm]

Outdoor scenarios are not just residential (which is a big market by itself) but also commercial. Our company does a lot of that business for both domain. Here are a set of JBL CBT speakers we installed at the Great Wheel in Seattle for example: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ransducer-speakers-in-commercial-project.310/

 

[SivKiv]

Has anyone tried replacing the tweeter on these? They look pretty great on almost every other aspect, but the uneven response plus distortion from the tweeter seems to be it's biggest limiting factor here.

 

[Boat]

H

Hello,

adding a small EQ, the score of this speaker goes from 2.4 to 4.3.

Here is the details of the score components:

         SPK auEQ
-----------------
NBD  ON 0.80 0.65
NBD  LW 0.73 0.47
NBD PIR 0.73 0.49
SM  PIR 0.46 0.80
SM   SP 0.60 0.76
LFX       47   47
LFQ     1.42 1.42
-----------------
Score    2.4  4.3
-----------------

Visually the EQ looks like:
View attachment 153990
and it flattens the LW and the PIR except around the very messy zone.
View attachment 153992

View attachment 153994

Here is the EQ in APO format:

EQ for JBL Control 29AV-1 computed from ASR data
Preference Score 2.4 with EQ 4.3
Generated from http://github.com/pierreaubert/spinorama/generate_peqs.py v0.11
Dated: 2021-09-18-06:47:49

Preamp: -4.7 dB

Filter  1: ON PK Fc  3048 Hz Gain +4.63 dB Q 4.59
Filter  2: ON PK Fc  6595 Hz Gain -3.97 dB Q 3.12
Filter  3: ON PK Fc 14155 Hz Gain +4.00 dB Q 3.43
Filter  4: ON PK Fc   386 Hz Gain +0.78 dB Q 0.45
Filter  5: ON PK Fc  1950 Hz Gain +2.11 dB Q 6.00
Filter  6: ON PK Fc  1341 Hz Gain -1.62 dB Q 6.00
Filter  7: ON PK Fc 10690 Hz Gain -0.74 dB Q 3.81
Filter  8: ON PK Fc  3926 Hz Gain -0.65 dB Q 6.00
Filter  9: ON PK Fc  5464 Hz Gain -0.50 dB Q 6.00

Hi Pierre, would these filter settings be useful in an outdoor setting for the JBL 29av? My understanding is that the speaker measurements were done in a way that processes the room reflections out from the final measurement, so would it be safe to assume that your suggested filters would generally flatten/improve the speakers response in an outdoor setting generally (not considering any environmental reflections)?