JBL 660GTi

A set of speakers designed to show off about it being JBL’s 60th anniversary a feat in itself how many speaker and amplifier companies are that venerable? JBL hold a special place as they are the most famous pro audio brand and you have heard their stuff at theme parks, clubs and concerts. These are a two-way component speaker system with separate tweeter units, midbass drivers and one major combined passive crossover. Complete with a mounting kit to fit the tweeters in more than one application and screws and fixings and a choice of very upmarket grilles, one inlaid with Carbon fibre. They are part of the JBL GTi series their most upmarket the range includes a 6kW bass amp they make with Crown, the concert pro-amplifier people.
660GTi are supplied with EOS or Elliptical Oblate Spheroidal plates that fit snugly around the tweeters and are used to enhance the off axis response of the set. The big and well made windowed passive crossover has a high pass filter with a contour control for setting use with or without the EOS plates (you can ignore them if your install results in on-axis mounting) as well as offering a three position high frequency attenuation. You also get an extra connection position to affix a second set of speaker wires per channel for use bi-wired or bi-amplified. The set arrives in a quite bulky Aluminium case that has a sexy JBL 60th anniversary plate on it, identifying the product within.
– Power Handling 150 w RMS
– Sensitivity 92dB 1w/1M
– Own Pink noise test figure 113.7dB (Vol @20 @ trk 9 dB Drag Vol III)
– Passband 50Hz to 30kHz
– Tweeter diameter 69mm
– Tweeter Mounting Depth 41mm
– Midbass Mounting Depth 78mm
– Cone: Kevlar
– Tweeter: fabric dome uses EOS (Elliptical Oblate Spheroidal) waveguide plates
– Crossover slope & point:12dB per octave @ 2.5kHz
– Chassis: cast Aluminium
– Complete with: Aluminium case, choice of two sets of very posh grilles, HF waveguide plates and all fixings
Review by Adam Rayner
The perfect-bound manual that comes in a thick silver cover with this set is a posh bit of publishing. The system arrives in a lovely and quite usefully sized metal case that could be used by a sound off competitor to hold all his show gubbins in or even be used as luggage! Open it up and within solid foam inserts nestle some lovely bits of stuff. The midbass drivers are massively constructed and instead of being perforated all around the edges like cheese in an effort to fit all cars, they simply have the perfect standard fixing points on cast lugs. The tweeters are dense wee spuds and the plates they are supplied with are really heavy castings. There is a lot of detail about the anechoic chambers and laser interferometry testing they do and a good chunk of science about directivity within the manual and it explains that like all JBL speaker technology it is never gimmick and always rises from the physical sciences.
Plugged together, the passive is like a lone testicle (how very singular) and had to be fitted outside the test enclosures. It is a gorgeous thing and has a pair of really large knobs that operate simple switches. One is for adjusting the system to run with or without the elliptical waveguide devices and the other is a regular tweeter level attenuation control.
The sound was awesome. Huge but defined and sweet with it. The high frequencies were deliciously liquid and fast. Edges of sounds within the Yello track were just fabulous. You could hear space around the recording. They are American flavoured in their ability to just keep on getting louder while staying incredibly linear and they have more muscularity than some European style hifi but they are undoubtedly a ten for sound and scored easily into the Best Buy zone despite massive price and needing more power to drive than weedy speakers.
Overall 9.2
Sound Quality 10
Build Quality 10
Power Handling 10
Efficiency 8
Value For Money 8