JBL 4349 Review – Back to the future
JBL 4349 is Not Like Other Speakers. They’re Much, Much Fatter!
Ever since I was a little boy in the 1980s, I’ve loved hi-fi and powerful sound. My father was a hi-fi enthusiast to the core, and that tends to rub off.
Even though my father happily spent a lot of money on hi-fi and record-cleaning solutions, he didn’t have much regard for what he called “reference speakers.” He loved music with punch, with Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Springsteen as obvious favorites. And for that, a hi-fi system with “hair on its chest” was needed.
When he took me to my first hi-fi show over 30 years ago, it seemed that high-end producers were competing to reproduce piano in the best way – at the expense of everything that was fun. We even had a session in the concert hall itself, where an exhibitor brought a pair of small stand-mounted speakers – with a whole bunch of tweeters – to impress with a single piano piece. Sure, it sounded nice, but what else could they do? We never got an answer to that.
It wasn’t just a few shows my dad dragged me and my older brother to, and almost as many times he drove home irritated. Reference system. Boring.
It Should Rock
At home, he would gladly pull out Springsteen’s Born in the USA or Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, spin his Kenwood KD-500 direct-drive turntable, turn up the volume on the Harman/Kardon 730 receiver to 11, which in turn shot the guitar riffs out through a pair of quintessentially American JBL L112s, each with a hefty 12-inch woofer. That’s how it should sound!
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My father might have been a bit narrow-minded when it came to hi-fi. Because you shouldn’t dismiss a hi-fi system’s ability to reproduce delicate instruments in the most credible way. But he was absolutely right that a lot can sound boring when you feed it pop and rock. This could naturally be due to the recordings, which can sound dull when reproduced by an unforgivingly revealing hi-fi system. But it could just as well be about the ability to move air.
Narrow Baffles Are the Norm
Most speakers – expensive and cheap alike – have modestly sized woofers. This is because the baffle should be narrow to avoid sound waves crashing into each other along the baffle before radiating into the room – distorted and time-shifted. If you want the experience of timing and stereo perspective, the baffle needs to be narrow. If you want to move a lot of air, you need several small woofers instead of a single large one. If you want a large cabinet volume, the cabinets need to be deep instead of wide. That’s the message from many speaker designers.
Big Is Fat
There are many very good speakers built on this principle. But none of them sound like my dad’s old JBL L112. There was something special about the warmth and fullness you get from the large woofers, and the ability to sound fatter and fatter the louder you played.
And no, it’s not just nostalgic memories. Recently, I bought a pair of older JBL 4411 studio monitors, with the same configuration as the L112 but with better crossovers and designed to sound time-coherent in a horizontal rather than vertical position. But the sound is unmistakably the old good JBL tone. Full, big, wonderful.
They are not without flaws, the treble sounds a bit harsh, and it’s not particularly homogeneous. The crossover frequency between the midrange and the treble is set at a whopping 4,000 Hz. That’s exactly where the ear is most sensitive, and certainly not where you want a crossover that inevitably messes with the phase. Yet, the speakers sound incredibly tough – especially as near-field monitors, which I use them as.
JBL 4349 – Refined Rawness
Which brings me to today’s highlight. JBL has not stopped designing big, square speakers with enormous drivers. They continue under the Synthesis name, a separate division from the Chinese-made Bluetooth speakers and headphones, focusing only on real hi-fi.
Recently, their old studio monitors have been revived, now enjoying new and current knowledge on how to make the best possible speakers.
The JBL 4349 has a 12-inch woofer, similar to many classic JBL monitors. The cabinets are larger than both my old monitors and the classics L112, so the 4349 can move more air and thus play louder without going into compression. But unlike its older family member, this is a pure two-way design. This means there is no dedicated midrange unit. Instead, it has a horn tweeter that takes up as much space as the woofer!
Specs
PRODUCT JBL 4349
ORIGIN USA
TYPE 2-way standmount loudspeaker
WEIGHT 38kg
DIMENSIONS (WxHxD) 445 x 737 x 343mm
FEATURES
• 38mm annular ring driver in HDI horn
• 300mm paper bass driver
• Quoted sensitivity: 91dB/1W/1m (8ohm)
DISTRIBUTOR Harman International
TELEPHONE 01612223325
WEBSITE harman.com
IN SIGHT
1) D2415K 38mm annular ring Teonex driver with HDI horn
2) Gold-plated bi-wireable binding posts
3) Front-facing reflex bass ports
4) 300mm Pure Pulp bass driver
The Horn Tweeter Handles Three Things at Once
The horn tweeter, which is essentially two 1.5-inch compression drivers in tandem, serves three functions. Firstly, it handles much higher sound pressure than a regular dome tweeter. Additionally, it’s easier to control the dispersion with a horn tweeter so that more of the energy reaches the listening area before being reflected from the side walls, floor, and ceiling. This provides better timing and reduces the room’s impact on the final sound.
And finally, remember what I said about diffractions from a large baffle? Well, here the horn goes almost all the way to the edges of the cabinet, so there’s no real baffle to speak of. And since diffraction issues are mainly in the high frequencies, the problem is solved.
The horn tweeter on the JBL 4349 has a special shape that acts as a waveguide for the high frequencies. This minimizes the distortion normally associated with horns, so you don’t get that sharp sound.
Punchy 12-Inch Woofer
The powerful 12-inch woofer has a rigid and lightweight pure cellulose (paper) cone and a 3-inch voice coil to maintain the best possible control over the driver even at high volume levels. It also has dual opposed spiders to reduce distortion.
The cabinets are 2.5 cm thick with front-mounted bass reflex ports. Furniture-grade wood veneer is available in walnut with a blue grille or black walnut with a black grille.
Dual Terminals and Tone Control
Dual terminals on the back allow for bi-wiring or bi-amping, and in familiar JBL style, you can make tone adjustments with two knobs that smoothly attenuate high frequencies and “ultra-high” frequencies. This passively changes the characteristics of the crossover networks.
Stand-Mounted Speakers
If you’re used to regular floor-standing speakers, the JBL 4349 has a somewhat unusual format. The speakers are too low to sit directly on the floor, making them more akin to stand-mounted speakers. But calling them bookshelf speakers would be a mistake. They are 74 cm high, 44 cm wide, and 32 cm deep – and a total of 76 kg heavy! – so good luck with your IKEA shelf. Therefore, JBL recommends placing them on the JS-120 floor stands.
3… 2… 1… Liftoff!
Do the speakers give you “rock foot”? Try System of a Down’s Toxicity album, play it from start to finish at high volume! With the JBL 4349 driven by the Hegel H390, it sounds so awesome that I momentarily forget that these aren’t exactly happy times. With tracks like ATWA and Toxicity on the playlist, I get the urge to chug a river of beer while headbanging until I get a concussion. You can say the same about The Gentle Art of Making Enemies from Faith No More’s best album, King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime from 1995. That was when people actually played hard rock at parties, not just the silly electropop you get today.
The JBL 4349s are easy to place in the room. They can be placed further from the wall for a better stereo perspective and sense of depth, or closer to the back wall for an extra powerful bass experience – without becoming bloated. In the high-end class, there aren’t many speakers you just place where you want and leave them there. These are among them. You can accept that the bass is not the deepest, but it is lightning fast, and that is much more important.
Acoustic Tones
But the JBL speakers aren’t just about rocking, which would be unforgivable for over $ for a pair! Take the Americana ballad I See a Darkness by Bonnie “Prince” Billy. A lovely song, with Bonnie’s tender voice pouring out his soul. The voice really comes through, while the bass guitar rings warm and full. The piano’s timbre is enormous, and the emotions in the music just flow out of the speakers.
Without Equal
Speakers that sound like this, I don’t think can be made by anyone other than JBL. On the one hand, it sounds different from what other high-end manufacturers aim for. Warmer and definitely fatter. However, you can’t say this sounds unrealistic. Sure, the speakers steer the sound in a certain direction, but without revealing themselves as colored.
You can very well draw a parallel to Klipsch, which are also good at loudspeakers with horns. But Klipsch doesn’t have cabinets as well-damped as JBL, and I firmly believe Klipsch horn tweeters are rougher than these. For even though JBL doesn’t have ultra-expansive overtones of the “super-tweeter” type, it is so refined and well-tuned that the only thing that reveals it must be a horn is that an ordinary tweeter can’t handle the same sound pressure. Because this is the
big advantage of horns: they are so efficient that they can play loud without breaking a sweat.
Too Big?
Are these speakers for everyone? Definitely not. They are huge and hefty. They take up a lot of space in the living room and take no hostages. They can be integrated into most homes, but with quite a bit of work. I can’t imagine my wife wanting them. In addition, they cost a lot for a pair of stand-mounted speakers. Even so, it’s less than the JBL 4367 which have a 15-inch woofer but are otherwise quite similar.
However, there’s no doubt. If you want speakers that stand out, and that sound great with every kind of music and at every volume level, there’s nothing better than JBL 4349. If you also grew up with a father who loved JBL and never compromised on sound pressure, it’s a jackpot.
HOW IT COMPARES
In a market dominated by tower speakers and bookshelf models, JBL’s bumper-sized ‘standmount’ really, er, stands out. But if this modern take on a retro design is something that appeals then you should check out Klipsch’s very low- slung Heresy IV.
VERDICT
JBL 4349 is a fat trip back in time, with modern qualities. The horn tweeter never sounds shrill or sharp, it’s the opposite of harsh, but it can blast out loads of decibels and still maintain control. The 12-inch woofer hits hard and precise, and the cabinets can take a beating. If you want reference speakers with deep, juicy bass and effortless dynamics, there’s nothing better.
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