I finally got around to writing my review of the L100 Classic and taking measurements. Thought I'd share those here as I can talk in a bit more detail to my results, and I've only seen one other measurement with off axis data.
As usual, I take measurements until the end of my review process. My subjective impressions are much the same as when I first tried them: I think they are some of my favorite speakers I've heard at home. Excellent soundstage, dynamics, and vocals, detail.
I do think they are pricey at $4,000. At $3,000 they probably would have had many more buyers and caught the attention of more young audiophiles. Alternatively, I'd love to see a speaker like this with an active design to really take advantage of that woofer. It's weird to have something far smaller like Bowers Formation Duo dig muchdeeper into the bass at normal listening levels.
Still these are probably my favorite passive speakers I've reviewed so far, and I'd likely purchase them myself if I had the $4,000 lying around.
Okay, graphs time. Not sure they fully back up my subjective impressions, but it's fun to compare.
JBL told me they are meant to measure flattest anechoically with knobs at the default 0-degree setting. While JBL's engineers are obviously smarter than me and are working with much more data, after much fiddling, I found I preferred the speaker with the 'highs' knob set to max and the 'mids' knob halfway from default to max. To my eye that setting looks flatter, but who knows.
First, here's the response with the grille off and knobs set to their default (white) and max (blue) values. In orange is the speaker with the grille on and knobs at default. The grill causes a deeper dip at 3.5khz and a 1-2 dB overall treble reduction beyond 2kkz - easily compensated by the knobs. By the way, note the Y-axis is in 5 dB intervals, not 10.
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Now here is the response with knobs set to max mids and minimum highs and vice versa:
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Can't really imagine why anyone would use the lower extremes, but hey it's still nice to have some basic tone controls on a passive speaker. I guess you can turn down the mids knob if you want a V shape for the bass to really stand out. Maybe you're throwing a party, idk.
Now here's the horizontal response from 0-75 degrees off-axis, centered on the tweeter, which itself is off-center on the speaker's baffle, leading to somewhat different results for the left and right side of the speaker:
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The listening window is the average of 0 degrees, +/- 15 and 30 degrees horizontal, and +/- 10 degrees vertical. Kind of a mishmash of Harman and NRC's.
And lastly here are the vertical results from 0 to 30 degrees above and below the tweeter:
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Some thoughts:
Was glad to see my measurements lined up with the few others I've seen. At first glance, the response looks pretty okay, and within a +/- 3dB window, but certainly not the flattest passive speaker I've measured (that honor goes to the
KEF R3). But there are some interesting things to point out.
The two most notable features are the peaks at 5k and 2k. Though on axis, 5k the peak looks pretty bad, JBL's recommendation is to
not toe in the speakers unless they are very far apart. We can see from the horizontal response that by the time we reach 30 degrees off axis, the peak has largely flattened out.
The 2K peak is a bit more interesting because it's consistent throughout the off-axis measurements, yet I generally didn't notice it in listening beyond perhaps a slightly forward quality to vocals. However, we know that in a typical stereo setup there will be a dip right around this frequency when seated in the 'sweet spot'. See Toole's book,
figure 7.2, let me know if it's not okay to reproduce the image here:
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Considering these speakers are aimed at the stereo-loving audiophile who is finicky about positioning, it seems to me that having a boost in this region makes sense. Perhaps I'm rationalizing my subjective impressions, but I wouldn't be surprised if this peak were at least partially on purpose. Whether it's too much is another matter, but again, I thought vocals were a standout with this speaker, and I noted dialogue intelligibility was excellent in my home theater setup. I don't use a center speaker, so I normally use my receiver's dialogue boost function with other speakers, but didn't find it necessary here.
I'll let you make of the measurements what you will, but those are my thoughts. Either way, I really enjoyed my time with the speakers and was quite sad to have to send them back! Although that's partly because packing them back up was a pain. JBL has no right to call this 60-pound beast a 'bookshelf' speaker
P.S. I did take nearfield measurements to splice on the low-end, but I'm still working to make sure I'm doing the woofer and summations right before sharing.