Hi.....

Well I've only been here for about a week, so I'm sorry if this has been discussed to death before.

In late 70's / early 80's I was spellbound by the sound of JBL home speakers; I owned some L50's and then L100T's (which I still own!) and also by Pro speakers in stage situations as I mixed a band.

When I sat the final pre-buy listen test for the L100Ts they also had a pair of dual 15" 'lots-a-other drivers' studio monitors (I have no idea of model so long ago) that BLEW_ME_AWAY but being a uni student at the time the L100T's suited the budget.

Now over the years I have listened to the various home range of speakers, planning an upgrade to my 100Ts, but NOTHING really notibably excited me. (Of course I am in Australia so we may not have had complete offerings.) In every other technological area over a period of some 20 years the improvements have been 10 fold / 100 fold. So why to my ears have home series gone backwards??????

Back then I had a home PC, home made Motorola 6809 CPU, 1k RAM, dual 700K floppies, and a 600 Baud tape. Now dual PIII 1.4G processor, 3x 15k RPM ultra 160 32G drives with hardware RAID controller, 1 G RAM. So why can't I just go buy a pair of JBL L10000000000000000t speakers that make my current ones sound like a pair of Bose 501's (with the internal light globes blown), submerged in a block of concrete????

Also the professional series could not have progressed any quantum leaps of magnitude of improvemnt as there would not be this following trying to capture that vintage sound.

Some questions that I ponder:

Is the older sound more 'real' or is it just something we heard in our youth and wish to keep?

Was their a real change in the philosophy/ideals of JBL to produce a 'different' sound. I question that it could be market driven; has the human ear evolved to seek a different sound in some 20 years?

If there exists a subculture who like this older sound but it is not so large as to warrent any manufacturer making systems to WOW us then are we just 'odd'.

Surely an aural presentation that we consider to be shear excellence must be that... we have heard 'real' sounds, real vocals, real orchestras, and a speaker system that can reproduce it to within a whisker of reality must be still be marketable???

<< FLAME retardent suite on, expecting some polarised replies >>

cheers, Jarrod