Herb Reichert - JBL Stage A170

LOUDSPEAKER

In the realm of loudspeaker reviews, John Atkinson’s measurements and my empirical observations have one important equivalency: Both are meaningless abstractions until confirmed by your listening experience. Both are contingent on factors that are necessarily obtuse and not especially controllable.

Fortunately, the only loudspeaker assessment that really matters depends entirely on consensus: you and your buddies, and your buddies’ buddies, and their children, and their children’s friends, listening, analyzing, debating, then listening some more—then buying and selling over periods of time. In the end, there is little middle ground: A loudspeaker either slips silently into obscurity or sits heralded on a mountaintop, like the original Quad ESL, the BBC LS3/5a, or the Klipschorn. In my view, long-term user satisfaction is the only reliable assessment of a speaker’s true value.

Complicating assessments even further are audiophile expectations. Expectations are preconceived prejudices that can, and usually do, affect consensus. The worst expectations involve price. The expectation that a $500 loudspeaker could not possibly perform as well as a $5000 loudspeaker is an obvious example, and one that I personally wrestled with during my Magnepan LRS, Klipsch RP-600M, and Wharfedale Linton reviews. During my first weeks with JBL’s $499.99/pair Stage A170 tower speakers, I kept saying to myself, “Are these skinny things really as good as they seem? Or am I missing inadequacies in their performance?”

Description

JBL’s new Stage series of loudspeakers replaces the company’s much-admired Studio series—which, by comparison, had a more styled appearance. The Studio series speakers also featured horn-loaded tweeters, which the Stages do not.