JL Audio 15W0v2.4

Product Details
Manufacturer: JL Audio
Distributor: Celsus Ice
Website: link
Typical Selling price: £149.99
The woofer that brought back ‘Mo’. A bass-face character from the early JL Audio reference manual, the idea was that the bass from the products so marked would make you as round eyed, open mouthed and erect of hair as him. Described as ‘Absolute Beasts’, they are available in 10, 12 and 15 inch sizes. I of course chose to go with the biggest, baddest one. It was tested on a JBL GTO 24001 monoblock bass amplifier, a good bit too powerful to allow it to give full wellie to the woofer as the woofer is rated at 500 watts and at four Ohms, the amp, far more. It was mounted in a sealed enclosure of slightly greater internal cubic than the smallest 1.75cu ft recommendation. Seen at a recent JL Audio training night, the WØ v2 is also sold in different impedances of four or eight Ohms. The chassis is pressed steel and the magnet has a vent showing at the end of the plastic boot around the motor. Nickel plated squeeze posts are used rather than simple lugs for the speaker wire fixing, which is a nice touch. The top shows a fat roll surround and a well made trim piece. The product comes with its own (not multi-product) manual with all details and designs for both ported and sealed enclosures. Packaging is well made and informatively printed.
– Frequency response: not quoted
– Power Handling: 500w RMS
– Concave domeless cone design
– Pressed Steel chassis
– Plastic magnet boot
– Elevated Frame Chassis for better cooling
– Extremely small sealed-enclosure volume requirement of 1.75cu ft
– 4 Ohm voice coil
– Bright plated 4mm squeeze post terminals
– Voice Coil Diameter: 2.5 inch
– Mounting depth 182mm
– Mounting hole diameter 349mm
– Bolt hole circle 370mm
– One-way linear Excursion (Xmax) 12.7mm
– Efficiency: 88.2dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 24.43Hz (free air resonance)
– Qes: 0.508
– Qms: 9.474
– Qts: 0.482
– Vas: 144.6 Litres
– Individually serial numbered
Review by Adam Rayner
Compared to a subwoofer in a standard (cast) chassis – like the SNG Audio I just tested, this is a thoroughbred Impreza Turbo next to a homespun blunt-arsed V8 muscle car. For one, it’s a prima donna when it comes to installation. No ‘standard hole fling it in’ but rather a careful custom construction with the correct routered-out front baffle. It’s full of model-specific engineering. I found the thing had to be sealed in with stuff in my test box to get a decent seal. Reviewer-only problem as your baffle can be shaped or made for the W0v2.
Seal it I did and the results were fascinating.
You have to take the woofer in its context of being the least expensive brother of what is arguably the best woofer in the world, the JL W7. It isn’t going to go snake’s belly low and then crack pavements, nor especially in fifteen inch size, will it be holding a bass line like a £600 Morel Ultimo woofer. What it does though, is a slice of what JL Audio punters will want. Which is bass that is above all, as accurate as it can be for the money.
The JL Audio 15W0v2 woofer has a slew of the JL smarts in its innards. Ways of fixing things to each other with greater engineering strength so as to hit them harder without the parts falling apart mechanically and ways of self-cooling the coil with venturi effects. Also, whereas the SNG Audio woofer I just tried had been well and truly run in before I had my go, the W0 here was not. More than any other speakers, fifteens really change in character as their wobbly bits get softened up or ‘run in’. They wobble further with less watts so sound better at lower volumes and they can go further overall, leading to a bigger mechanical Xmax or cone travel in and out and so add an ability to drop a bit deeper. As a fifteen is so huge you really notice this.
So the fact that the JL 15W0 didn’t drop as deeply as the SQL15 from SNG may not be the same after the speaker has been run in as it has a really big, fat top roll surround.
First, I checked it out with the pounding yet ring piece-tight bass bump on a track on the Spirit of Sound CD I so love. This was the one that blew me away with the Morel subwoofer. Whereas the SNG was woofly and seemed to take a long time to finish a note, the W0 was much tighter. Not Ultimo tight or even W7 tight but still tracking the wobbles within the bass notes and hanging on.
I can see why JL are so keen to educate their users about the power limits that they will warrant their speakers for, as I found that when giving the 500w speaker too much of the reference JBL 2400 bass amp’s kilowatt output, it didn’t like it and you could hear its suspension purr. However, they do make speakers that’ll use way more than rated power for serious lengths of time and this was happy to use the JBL as pretty much a match, despite its much-over-W0 power spec.
I relented from one sort of silliness only to kick in with another. The disc was changed for the daftest chestnut of all. More Bass, More Boom, More Bottom by Power Supply, one of the daftest made-for-Bass-CD outfits ever assembled. Their Woofer Excursion Test track six is bonkers and like the SNG, the JL didn’t bat an eyelid and played it all, right down to the bottom notes. The difference was the sound quality. The JL was a whole notch up and dare I say it, more musical.
It really didn’t want to be too loud down the very deepest bits but again, I need to spank its arse for a month to be really sure and perhaps the best way would be to see how one goes after some months in a user’s car. For now, I would recommend a really big porting and low tuning as they have a nice low FS or ‘favourite wobbling frequency’ of just over 24Hz! This means that done right, you could get a hell of a result.
Four of these in a big van with huge deep breathing ported boxes for the cost of one Morel Ultimo 12’d be interesting.
A worthy addition to the JL Audio legends’ panoply of weaponry and a way to get some JL Audio bass quality into your world for less than you might have thought.
Less fo’ Mo!
Mo Bass.
Sound Quality 8.0
Build Quality 8.0
Power Handling 8.0
Efficiency 7.0
Value For Money 9.0
Overall rating 8.0