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From sagacity to serendipity
As history has it, there's always a role for serendipity in science and technology. My encounter with the JB3 somehow falls in line with the good fate of unsought findings. I've never thought of auditioning a 3" widebander and would not have volunteered for such an endeavor. Maybe I haven't heard enough but of all the full-range speakers I've seriously listened to, none had enough magic to lure me over. Vocals from some floorstanders with elaborate rear-loaded horns sounded like singing with hands cuffing the mouth. Tonal integrity and image density bloated and were smeared by coloration from cabinet resonance. To some people this kind of sound might work wonders with valve bloom. Not me. Some vented-box bookshelf designs have less of such problems but my biggest complaint is not so much insufficient bass but rather, not enough nice treble - by which I mean a silky smooth octave in the super high domain. They sound stressed and stretched to even reach there.


The closest I ever got to owning full-range speakers were my Loth-X BS-1, which understandably feature a crossover-less design with additional dome tweeter. Yet my uneducated ears remained prepared to be tamed by a thoroughbred widebander. With all this prep, my initial audition of the 3" JB3 was still disorienting. This time, nice treble prevailed thanks to the 23kHz upper limit. But where was the bass? For the first two months or so, I had to add my paired subwoofers (Yamaha YST-SW80). When I discussed this with Tommy, you might imagine the designer's reaction. A man of sagacity was met by a man of stupidity trying to downgrade his creation to home-theater levels! I almost had to send him back the speakers as I began to convince myself that I was the wrong person for the job. But I didn't. For better or worse, we stuck it out together. I just let them running and breaking in while skepticism kept brewing on both ends.


I moved on to other projects and by the end of the Audio Space review, without blinking or thinking, hooked up the JB3 to the Audio Space Pre-2 + Nova M-34 as the driving force and my Restek + Assemblage D2D/DAC as digital source. According to the specs, the JB3 handles 30 watts max. I set the Nova M-34 to ultra-linear and with medium negative feedback, that should have yielded an output of no more than 60wpc. Perhaps I should have set it to triode for 32wpc but somehow I preferred the wider soundstage of ultra-linear and the JB3 coped impeccably. I deliberately put the JB3 next to the Apogee Centaur Minor. When I played any CD with music for strings, most of my friends thought the sound came from the Apogees. It was my intention to trick them but I wouldn't laugh because I myself was confused at times. That demonstrated two things: First, the JB3 can deliver very transparent treble and midrange; and second, the JB3 can get away with its genetic weakness in the bottom octave with certain kinds of music.


With some recordings that are particularly rich in bass already, the JB3 really rocks. Take Ghibli the Classics [Forward Music FW2033J]. This is a fantastic collection of movie themes mostly composed by Joe Hisaishi and Yumi Kimura for Hayao Miyazaki's all-time animation favorites like Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle but here transcribed and arranged for cello and accompanying instruments in the style of classical, jazz and even tango. The JB3 presented a musical and sonic gourmet feast. The dimension and scope of percussion, harmonica, guitar and string ensemble, not to mention the solo cello and that deep sonorous double bass, all sounded so relaxed and well related to each other. Instruments spread out with surveyor accuracy that made it very hard to believe I was listening to a pair of 3" full-range drivers. As I said, the recording has the lower octaves already embedded strongly so anyone could easily be deceived that the snappy punch and kick-butt oomph was coming from the 6.5" woofer adjacent.


Of course when I switched back to the real thing, everyone could hear the difference. It was obvious. The point being, when there's no comparison, a lot of grace marks go to the 3" driver for doing the impossible. And it depends on the repertoire. With piano, there's no way to cheat. Yet the JB3 is not unlistenable. The crucial element is balance. Though rolling off at around 50Hz, the JB3 handles the full frequency it's born to cover with neutrality and coherence. You still get the full flavor of the 88 keys in relative terms when struck. The longer you spend with the JB3, the more you forget its small shortcoming and begin to appreciate the big wonder. Most people would think a 3" crossover-less speaker shouldn't need much time to break in. I don't know. My feeling is that it mellows with time. And bass comes with maturity. I don't have a brand-new pair to A/B to prove it but I just feel it.




Having spent 10 months with the JB3, I eventually became another skeptic converted by sheer exhaustion of collective evidence. This was rare but real serendipity worth sharing, especially from a long-time subwoofer devotee and unrelenting loyalist to Mark & Daniel's speakers. The revelation came about as a kind of atonement for my wrongful bitterness towards the Yamaha NS-10M just because I expected them to sound like the B&W 801. It's about learning to appreciate the intrinsic quality of a piece of design and readjust your personal preferences. It's about acquired taste that grows over time and the willingness to widen horizons. When I took the JB3 back into the diagonal room to go through the second phase of audition, it was six or seven months later. By then, both the speakers and the listener had evolved for the better to be 110% ready for the challenge.