Custon Installation Equipment Reviews

If you are looking for an unusual speaker that will fit anywhere, including unconventional spaces, and still be decorative, you should check out the JBL Control NOW indoor and outdoor loudspeakers. The quarter-round shape allows for the uniquely versatile speaker to be installed in a wide variety of places including areas where other speakers can no be installed. Priced between $249 and $279, these guys won't break the bank either.

The drivers are mounted behind a curved quarter-round front section, and the rear of the enclosure has three angled sections that enable the speakers to be corner-mounted between a ceiling and wall or between two walls. They can also be placed either horizontally or vertically on a shelf. The JBL Control NOW is a black finish, and the JBL Control NOW AW is a white finish.

Multiple JBL Control NOW speakers can be joined to create half-round, three-quarter-round, or fully round configurations, and they can be hung from a ceiling using an optional pole-mount bracket and standard ceiling-fan hardware. When used in two, three, or four speaker arrays, they can be configured for either single-channel or single-point stereo use, for maximum flexibility in multi-room music distribution systems.

JBL Control NOW and JBL Control NOW AW loudspeakers are designed from the ground up to deliver outstanding sound quality in the most challenging installation applications. To ensure accurate audio performance even in less-than-optimal acoustic situations, the loudspeakers feature a tweeter mounted in a patented JBL Bi-Radial horn, and have a newly developed profile that has been optimized to minimize diffraction effects from room surfaces to deliver exceptionally smooth, wide frequency response. The speakers have constant-directivity dispersion when wall-mounted, and omnidirectional characteristics when corner-mounted or grouped in a four-speaker circular array.

The tweeter incorporates a 3/4-inch titanium-laminate diaphragm and a ferrofluid-cooled voice coil that is driven by a high-Gauss neodymium-boron-iron magnet, for high-power-handling capability, and outstanding resolution and transient response. The tweeter is complemented by two 4-inch woofers that incorporate dual neodymium-boron-iron magnets, which completely surround the voice coil. The design of the woofer’s motor structure and suspension was optimized using Finite Element Analysis (FEA), a computer-analysis technique.

To further refine their performance, the JBL Control NOW speakers feature enclosures and baffles made from a thermoplastic-composite material that contains both glass and mineral fill, which provides high rigidity and damping. The enclosure’s mechanical design utilizes thick walls, cast-aluminum internal bracing and other refinements to minimize internal resonances and acoustical loss.