JBL MS12SD2 12 Inch Subwoofer

Product Details
Manufacturer: JBL
Website: http://www.jblcaraudio.co.uk
Typical Selling price: (CAS) £250.00
The chassis is described as Injected Aluminium yet looks as skinny as pressed steel at the edges despite having some greater thickness to it in the basket itself. The cone is Polypropylene as is the dust dome. There’s a silvery chrome line around the cone’s edge and the JBL logo is raised writ large on the dome. The woofer comes only in DVC (Dual Voice Coil) configuration with either two or four Ohm coils We had the dual two ohm job in twelve inch size. The top roll suspension looks like a Wavelok weave reinforced rubber and is double-stitched to the cone, which looks encouraging in what is currently the top woofer in the JBL brand. Prefixed MS, they come in 10, 12 and a mighty 15 inch size. The magnet has a big case around it and the terminals are a big 4mm aperture squeeze post of excellent bite strength.
There’s a heavy duty plastic trim ring for the top of the subwoofer to make the chassis look more substantial, while the size is utterly perfect-standard and fitted exactly in to the cut-out routed into the surface of the Acoustic Wood test enclosure I used. Power was courtesy of a JBL GTO 24001 monoblock, (WAY over sized for the task, so care was used) with an Alpine MRX-F30 amplifier driving a set of Alpine DD Linear Japan-market only DDL-RT17S components as test rig, all driven from a Kenwood KDC-9547 CD player with lovely OEL display and Dolphins jumping on it. Interconnects by JL Audio, power cabling by Stinger, Odyssey battery, voltmeter used throughout testing.
– Frequency response: 30Hz to 400Hz
– Power Handling: 450w RMS (900w max)
– Polypropylene cone
– Injected Aluminium chassis
– Large rubber double-stitched surround
– Dual 2 Ohm voice coils
– Bright plated 4mm squeeze post terminals
– Voice Coil Diameter: 2.5 inch (64mm)
– Mounting depth 171mm
– 1,600 Gram magnet
– Efficiency: 87dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 36Hz
– Qes: 0.78
– Qms: 10.08
– Qts: 0.73
– Vas: 49 Litres
-Xmax: 6.5mm
Editor Review : JBL MS12SD2 12 Inch Subwoofer
Thielle-Small parameters are funny things. You wouldn’t think that having two four ohm coils instead of having a pair of two ohm coils on its arse would change much. But it does. When I wrote up the bones of this review, I had fitted the JBL MS12SD2 subwoofer to the box, using the coils in series via a small jumper of eight gauge power wire. I sat down to put all the technical details in and found the specifications sheet in with the woofer had stuff about the whole line. Thus, being a lazy fart, I chose one set of specs as I have a twelve, so it has to be either two by two or two by four coiled and put them in. Of course, upon checking, I had it wrong and was compelled to correct the details above. Can you believe that the higher impedance coils gain an extra half millimetre of Xmax and yet lose two litres of equivalent air-bounciness or compliance? Well, geeky I know, but the two products allow the system designer the maximum flexibility as you can choose between 1, 2, 4 or eight Ohms impedances in any given size of driver.
Stuff all that, what’s the ‘˜best’ woofer JBL currently offer up for car use, like? Pretty damn hot is the answer, even given that at a ‘˜mere’ £250 for a twelve, this is by far from the highest priced woofer on the market for cars right now, with there being a Ground Zero available from stock for £1,600 and a Vibe Black Death fifteen is a grand!
I played with it for ages, got completely carried away and had a bit of an Eighties-fest on my landing. (Our Mod, Neeley would have loved it.) I just adore that over-produced Trevor Horn-Rims sound, the man’s a god! I played some bonkers bass CD stuff as well, as apart from some real fun tunes, you also need to have some things that are comparable from system to system. I have worked with pro sound engineers who always used the same track on the same CD to do the basic tonal balance, as they knew it so well and tuned-up the system from there.
The one thing that really startled me, but shouldn’t have, is that this woofer is not the Ultimate Hooligan’s Tool with high SQ, as that costs scary money. JBL have made drivers that can do that and still do for their top end home theatre speaker products but this is about real-world affordability with a fat slice of quality and precision, as well as having at least some hairs on its ball sack. (yes, I DID just refer to a JBL woofer as having a scrotum)
For the woofer tracked the richness of the textured bass in Welcome to the Pleasure Dome as well as not giving a Dwarf Tamarind’s Moustache Hair’s care about playing every single damn note the crazed ‘˜Power Supply’ bass artistes could record for us. I wicked up the power and even though I suspect that at three years old, the Odyssey battery is getting a little tired and was running at 11.5 volts mostly, that I was till making a lot of watts. The JBL GTO24001 surfboard of a monoblock will be making absurdly more than the maximum power rating of this woofer, even with its arms tied up behind its back, power wise and even at four ohms with the woofer’s load being 2+2 ohms coils in series.
And by crikey can it drop! All the way to the bottom of the lowest notes and still plays the wobble-inside that’s cruelly overlain at that point. It has some real grip, despite all the extra ornamentation that must add weight to the moving mass. The magnet is the same size as is used on the fifteen, (it’s 2 inch coils and a 43 ounce magnet on the ten and 2.5 inch coils and a 56 ounce magnet on the twelves and fifteens) so I suspect this is the Boo-Yah.
Boo-Yah Tribe (Google them) were a rap act of Western-Samoan parents. All HUGE brothers (as in related to each other) and yet light on their feet and a Boo-Yah was a sawn-off shotgun. (From the sound such a gangster’s weapon made and nowadays an American slag term meaning an exclamation of delight.)So a twelve inch woofer with a fifteen incher subwoofer’s magnet and motor structure is going to be grippy, tight and powerful, as this is.
If you get the fifteen, you may find it is a tiny bit slower on the leading edges of hard bass notes but drops lower as the FS of the fifteen is but 29Hz. With this driver, though, I had both weight and bass from the lowest notes, with a lovely sweet lower midbass as well. By which I mean the 50Hz to upper cut off zone. Where some woofers will need a really savage crossover slope not to intrude, the JBL MS12SD2 is linear enough not to mess up your sound quality with a cuppy hollow and hard-to-eradicate overlap.
I did find if I turned it up too far, that despite the double-stitched cone looking so badass and the maximum power rating being a fat 900 watts peak, that if you DO over-power it, unlike the TurboNutterBastard (and much cheaper) JBL GTO woofers that can eat thrice their power rating and mostly just get smelly voice coils rather than blow up, you can get the MS woofer to complain and buzz a tad. I wicked it back to around a half kilowatt by guesstimate (still more than it aughta get given) and played some more.
It mayn’t be like the exotic SQ woofers such as the JL W7 or the Morel Ultimo, but for £250 it scores well for VFM for what it does. For it does some wonderful deep, accurate, melodic and damn make you wanna dance like a great stupid lardy twat on his landing bass, dreaming back to student days and getting a bit emotional.
And that’s about as good as it gets. You need to have it all working damn well to really get off on this kit, (or I do anyway, so deep in my very fabric is this addiction) and I just lost it and went off into one.
Walks into Talk Audio Best Buy status.
Overall 9.2
Sound Quality 10
Build Quality 10
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 8
Value For Money 9

In a Nutshell
A very high quality subwoofer with good melodic as well as depth ability, with good looks and engineering and a slice of power handling. Not like the GTO hooligan woofers, this will not like being given too much over its admittedly high 450w RMS power handling rating but still represents great value.