This is a review and detailed measurements of the JBL Control X Indoor/Outdoor speaker. It was kindly purchased new by a member and drop shipped to me for testing. It costs US $205 (pair) on Amazon but the owner purchased them at one of those crazy Harman sales for just $99 a pair!
Notice: our company Madrona Digital is a dealer for Harman products (in custom installation business) which is the parent company of JBL. So feel free to read as much bias as you like into the subjective aspects of this review.
Despite its low cost and outdoor orientation, the Control X uses the same style waveguide as the rest of JBL professional line:
Usually these outdoor speakers don't have a port but this one does!
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of 1%.
Reference axis was the tweeter center. I did not attach the grill since it came separated from it. Maybe I should???
Sitting on a surface, the speaker tilts back. I partially compensated for that by tilting it forward for measurements.
JBL Control X Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
If that ditch wasn't there around 300 Hz and there was not a tilt up response, it would have been darn good!
Near-field response shows good design when managing port/enclosure resonance:
Not sure why the tweeter drops so much though above 10 kHz.
Early window math is not made for mounting this against the wall:
Ditto for predicted in-room response:
Distortion is kept surprisingly under control at 86 dBSPL:
I could hear some amount of bass distortion during the sweeps at 96 dBSPL but it was much lower than many powered monitors.
Impedance is reasonable at minimum of 5 ohm:
I was shocked how well controlled beam width and hence directivity is in horizontal axis:
This puts many professional monitors to shame!
Vertically even it is better than it would be although some of the credit goes to the smaller woofer in use here:
JBL Control X Speaker Listening Tests and Equalization
I was so impressed by the female reference tracks I use for my testing. In far field setting, the Control X sounded downright beautiful! The resolution and clarify together with tonality were on the money. Moving to bass heavy tracks though took the bloom of the rose some. Good news was that deep bass did not upset it. Nor did volume. Despite being so little, I was able to pump sound into my massive room with no difficulty! On some tracks, there was more brightness than I like as predicted by the measurements. But you could live with them.
I took a shot at EQ but from past experience, I know that dealing with bass response is tricky as the room massively modifies that. Such was the case here:
I think it is a toss up as to whether these settings are an improvement or not. Will need to make in-room measurements and correct the combination.
Conclusions
I had very low expectations going into this review. Plastic speaker selling for $99/pair? Surely that can't sound good. But clearly it does when a ton of thought and design goes into it as opposed to pure marketing which the outdoor speaker business is all about. Indeed these speakers are so good that you could get a pair and use them on your desktop. You would need a sub to get full-range response but otherwise, this is definitely a contender.
I am going to recommend the JBL Control X for both indoor and outdoor applications.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Notice: our company Madrona Digital is a dealer for Harman products (in custom installation business) which is the parent company of JBL. So feel free to read as much bias as you like into the subjective aspects of this review.
Despite its low cost and outdoor orientation, the Control X uses the same style waveguide as the rest of JBL professional line:
Usually these outdoor speakers don't have a port but this one does!
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of 1%.
Reference axis was the tweeter center. I did not attach the grill since it came separated from it. Maybe I should???
Sitting on a surface, the speaker tilts back. I partially compensated for that by tilting it forward for measurements.
JBL Control X Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
If that ditch wasn't there around 300 Hz and there was not a tilt up response, it would have been darn good!
Near-field response shows good design when managing port/enclosure resonance:
Not sure why the tweeter drops so much though above 10 kHz.
Early window math is not made for mounting this against the wall:
Ditto for predicted in-room response:
Distortion is kept surprisingly under control at 86 dBSPL:
I could hear some amount of bass distortion during the sweeps at 96 dBSPL but it was much lower than many powered monitors.
Impedance is reasonable at minimum of 5 ohm:
I was shocked how well controlled beam width and hence directivity is in horizontal axis:
This puts many professional monitors to shame!
Vertically even it is better than it would be although some of the credit goes to the smaller woofer in use here:
JBL Control X Speaker Listening Tests and Equalization
I was so impressed by the female reference tracks I use for my testing. In far field setting, the Control X sounded downright beautiful! The resolution and clarify together with tonality were on the money. Moving to bass heavy tracks though took the bloom of the rose some. Good news was that deep bass did not upset it. Nor did volume. Despite being so little, I was able to pump sound into my massive room with no difficulty! On some tracks, there was more brightness than I like as predicted by the measurements. But you could live with them.
I took a shot at EQ but from past experience, I know that dealing with bass response is tricky as the room massively modifies that. Such was the case here:
I think it is a toss up as to whether these settings are an improvement or not. Will need to make in-room measurements and correct the combination.
Conclusions
I had very low expectations going into this review. Plastic speaker selling for $99/pair? Surely that can't sound good. But clearly it does when a ton of thought and design goes into it as opposed to pure marketing which the outdoor speaker business is all about. Indeed these speakers are so good that you could get a pair and use them on your desktop. You would need a sub to get full-range response but otherwise, this is definitely a contender.
I am going to recommend the JBL Control X for both indoor and outdoor applications.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
