This is a review and detailed measurements of the JBL MA7100HP 7.2/5.2.2 home theater AVR with support for 8K over HDMI. It was kindly drop shipped by a member and costs US $1,200.
The industrial design is absolutely stunning! JBL goes from mundane to top of the heap with a massive gap between it and #2! The front has sheet of glass (or is it plastic?) and is even lit with orange color that shines below. Unlike models below it, it has a large color display. It is easy to use but it does have some problem. The input control spins faster than the graphics can keep up. It is usable but either having a stiffer input selector or faster CPU response would have been nice. Volume level sadly is tiny as you see. There is plenty of space for it to be much, much larger.
Another annoying thing is that it applies processing to the inputs to convert to surround. You can defeat this but as soon as you power cycle it, it goes back to default! Many times I would get no sound, only to realize it had gone from "Native" back to the surround mode.
I always upgrade the firmware before testing these devices. To my disappointed, even though the unit was on the network, it only gave me the option of USB firmware upgrade! I could not believe it but went about my business. About 10 minutes later, I look at the display and it is downloading an update and proceeding to reboot and such! All on its own. Worse yet, the upgrade takes a long time, probably 15 to 25 minutes. Pretty bad experience for a first time user who might get the family around the new gear, start playing a movie and have it go through this cycle unannounced.
The OSD (on screen display) is primitive black and white in low resolution but doesn't matter as it is just duplicating what is on the front panel. There are not that many settings to mess with which is fine with me.
The back side shows simplicity as it should be in a modern AVR:
Few need more inputs than this. We get ease of connectivity as you don't have spend time reading the labels in the back and possibly hooking up things to the wrong jacks. They could have done away with Zone 2 as well as in this day and age, people are not relying on that for sound in other rooms. Notice the pretty white remote.
Another major deviation here is use of both switching power supply and class D amplification. As a result, while not paper light, the MA7100 weighs much less than typical AVR.
Dirac room EQ is optional which is nice to have. Note that I have heard that two sub outputs are connected to each other and not independent.
NOTE: I am founder of Madrona Digital which in its custom integration business (non-retail) is a dealer for Harman products which includes JBL line (although I am not sure if we can source this specific line). Please keep this in mind as you read my subjective comments.
Due to lack of pre-out, I focused on testing the unit as all in one with speaker output as the sole means of measuring the output.
JBL MA7100HP AVR Measurements
I couldn't wait to bring up the dashboard to see how the unit performs:
While not horrible, this is below average for all amplifiers tested and AVRs for that matter:
The lackluster performance is due to both noise and distortion. You can see the contributions from the former:
We can't even do 16 bit dynamic range (96 dB) at max power?
Multitone test shows the contributions on distortion front:
And noise with elevated floor of the graph.
Frequency response test shows multiple things:
We see the classic roll off at 4 ohm due to load dependency of Class D amplifier design in the unit. It also shows a sharp cut off, indicating that input is always resampled to 44.1 or 48 kHz. This "helps" reduce the frequency dependency as it truncates the continued potential peaking at 8 ohm. Analog input is likewise digitized to same manner.
There is healthy amount of power:
Comparing to its higher-end sibling (Arcam), there is no noise but also earlier rise in distortion.
The amplifier has internal limiter, not allowing it to clip. You can keep cranking up the volume and it doesn't matter. Because of this, the max power is the same as what we see above, more or less:
I have a new measurement for you that kind of follows FTC rule. I measure max power at 1% at 1 kHz, and then sweep 20 kHz to 20 Hz to see if the amplifier can maintain that:
As you see, the amplifier went into protection at 63 Hz. I was surprised at this since at 1 kHz, it was very robust. While not much of a problem in practice, in testing with dummy load the amplifier created mechanical noise corresponding to input signal that was the loudest I have heard. Even wearing IEMs at 1 meter I could hear it singing! In real use the sound coming out of the speaker would mask it but still, this is excessive. While some switching amplifiers do this, they usually do it at or near max power. The JBL did this even at 5 watts from what I call (of course not as loud).
We have good bit of power at 8 ohm:
Spec is 125 watts which likely includes a bit of clipping I excluded.
The high level of noise masks some levels of distortion leaving us with a picture that is still not something to be super proud of:
Amplifier was stable on power up:
The top of the enclosure is far from the heatsinks so you can't judge the internal temperature by touching it (which was just warm). So let's peer into it using our thermal camera:
20 degree rise is not bad given how much I pushed the AVR during testing.
JBL MA7100HP Phono Stage Measurements
Here is the dashboard but please keep in mind that I normally don't include an amplifier for phono stage testing:
Looking at right side of the signal in FFT, we see flattening of the curve indicating that the amplifier is adding noise to phono stage. Wonderful showing in frequency response test though:
Conclusions
JBL has made massive strides in look and feel of the MA7100HP leaving its competition -- including its own -- in the dust. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at and for the most part, to use. Their target was lower performance levels and sadly, that is what they deliver. Performance is not terrible but nothing an enthusiast can get excited over. I hope they take this outside design and upgrade the internals at least one step. Then they would have a winner on their hand. As it is, I would use this AVR in a living room where looks are very important.
It is with heavy heart that I can't recommend the JBL MA7100HP AVR. Its beauty is sadly skin deep.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The industrial design is absolutely stunning! JBL goes from mundane to top of the heap with a massive gap between it and #2! The front has sheet of glass (or is it plastic?) and is even lit with orange color that shines below. Unlike models below it, it has a large color display. It is easy to use but it does have some problem. The input control spins faster than the graphics can keep up. It is usable but either having a stiffer input selector or faster CPU response would have been nice. Volume level sadly is tiny as you see. There is plenty of space for it to be much, much larger.
Another annoying thing is that it applies processing to the inputs to convert to surround. You can defeat this but as soon as you power cycle it, it goes back to default! Many times I would get no sound, only to realize it had gone from "Native" back to the surround mode.
I always upgrade the firmware before testing these devices. To my disappointed, even though the unit was on the network, it only gave me the option of USB firmware upgrade! I could not believe it but went about my business. About 10 minutes later, I look at the display and it is downloading an update and proceeding to reboot and such! All on its own. Worse yet, the upgrade takes a long time, probably 15 to 25 minutes. Pretty bad experience for a first time user who might get the family around the new gear, start playing a movie and have it go through this cycle unannounced.
The OSD (on screen display) is primitive black and white in low resolution but doesn't matter as it is just duplicating what is on the front panel. There are not that many settings to mess with which is fine with me.
The back side shows simplicity as it should be in a modern AVR:
Few need more inputs than this. We get ease of connectivity as you don't have spend time reading the labels in the back and possibly hooking up things to the wrong jacks. They could have done away with Zone 2 as well as in this day and age, people are not relying on that for sound in other rooms. Notice the pretty white remote.
Another major deviation here is use of both switching power supply and class D amplification. As a result, while not paper light, the MA7100 weighs much less than typical AVR.
Dirac room EQ is optional which is nice to have. Note that I have heard that two sub outputs are connected to each other and not independent.
NOTE: I am founder of Madrona Digital which in its custom integration business (non-retail) is a dealer for Harman products which includes JBL line (although I am not sure if we can source this specific line). Please keep this in mind as you read my subjective comments.
Due to lack of pre-out, I focused on testing the unit as all in one with speaker output as the sole means of measuring the output.
JBL MA7100HP AVR Measurements
I couldn't wait to bring up the dashboard to see how the unit performs:
While not horrible, this is below average for all amplifiers tested and AVRs for that matter:
The lackluster performance is due to both noise and distortion. You can see the contributions from the former:
We can't even do 16 bit dynamic range (96 dB) at max power?
Multitone test shows the contributions on distortion front:
And noise with elevated floor of the graph.
Frequency response test shows multiple things:
We see the classic roll off at 4 ohm due to load dependency of Class D amplifier design in the unit. It also shows a sharp cut off, indicating that input is always resampled to 44.1 or 48 kHz. This "helps" reduce the frequency dependency as it truncates the continued potential peaking at 8 ohm. Analog input is likewise digitized to same manner.
There is healthy amount of power:
Comparing to its higher-end sibling (Arcam), there is no noise but also earlier rise in distortion.
The amplifier has internal limiter, not allowing it to clip. You can keep cranking up the volume and it doesn't matter. Because of this, the max power is the same as what we see above, more or less:
I have a new measurement for you that kind of follows FTC rule. I measure max power at 1% at 1 kHz, and then sweep 20 kHz to 20 Hz to see if the amplifier can maintain that:
As you see, the amplifier went into protection at 63 Hz. I was surprised at this since at 1 kHz, it was very robust. While not much of a problem in practice, in testing with dummy load the amplifier created mechanical noise corresponding to input signal that was the loudest I have heard. Even wearing IEMs at 1 meter I could hear it singing! In real use the sound coming out of the speaker would mask it but still, this is excessive. While some switching amplifiers do this, they usually do it at or near max power. The JBL did this even at 5 watts from what I call (of course not as loud).
We have good bit of power at 8 ohm:
Spec is 125 watts which likely includes a bit of clipping I excluded.
The high level of noise masks some levels of distortion leaving us with a picture that is still not something to be super proud of:
Amplifier was stable on power up:
The top of the enclosure is far from the heatsinks so you can't judge the internal temperature by touching it (which was just warm). So let's peer into it using our thermal camera:
20 degree rise is not bad given how much I pushed the AVR during testing.
JBL MA7100HP Phono Stage Measurements
Here is the dashboard but please keep in mind that I normally don't include an amplifier for phono stage testing:
Looking at right side of the signal in FFT, we see flattening of the curve indicating that the amplifier is adding noise to phono stage. Wonderful showing in frequency response test though:
Conclusions
JBL has made massive strides in look and feel of the MA7100HP leaving its competition -- including its own -- in the dust. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at and for the most part, to use. Their target was lower performance levels and sadly, that is what they deliver. Performance is not terrible but nothing an enthusiast can get excited over. I hope they take this outside design and upgrade the internals at least one step. Then they would have a winner on their hand. As it is, I would use this AVR in a living room where looks are very important.
It is with heavy heart that I can't recommend the JBL MA7100HP AVR. Its beauty is sadly skin deep.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
