How JBL Pro Tortures Speakers

At JBL Pro, we subject our designs to the most rigorous and demanding testing in the industry. As a result, the power rating specification of a JBL Professional product may be lower than that of a competitive speaker which has less actual power handling capability.

• JBL Pro tests speaker systems as systems. Some competitive speaker systems are rated based on the power rating of the individual transducers. Actually, the power handling of the individual components doesn't tell the entire story. When a transducer is installed in an enclosure, it may not be able to dissipate heat as well as it did outside of a box. Or the cross-over network might fail long before the transducers. When you select a JBL speaker system, you know that the design has been tested as a complete system.

• JBL Pro tests speaker designs with long-term testing at high power. A speaker system typically doesn't reach its maximum operating temperature for at least 2 or more hours. Yet some manufacturers make power handling claims based on mere minutes of testing. At JBL, our power tests subject the speaker to the kind of stress and strain it would get in years of actual use.

• JBL Pro uses the IEC spectrum for testing speakers. The IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has established a standard for a loudspeaker test signal. This method uses shaped noise in a specified frequency range (50 Hz - 5 kHz), a specified high and low-pass filter slope, and a specified "crest factor" (the ratio between the average and peak signal level). IEC shaped noise places greater demands on a speaker than real music.