JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam soundbar Fully-stocked bar
JBL is a company which stretches from the lowest to the highest echelons of audio, from real cinemas, studio monitors and high-end home cinema at the top, to the world’s most successful mono portable Bluetooth speakers at the bottom. It’s a size of operation which gives it an advantage in terms of economies of scale, in technology licensing — it probably doesn’t hurt, either, to be owned by Harman, with all its broad expertise across multiple audio brands, and beyond that by Samsung, with its extended technology strengths and massive marketing reach.
In short, JBL invariably offers more than you might expect at a given price, and its latest soundbar, the JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam, proves no exception.
Equipment
The JBL bar is solidly built and nicely compact at 71cm long and just 6cm high, low enough not to interfere with the screen real estate of all but the very lowest-slung TVs when on a bench-top, and further neatened in many ways by being a bar which requires no subwoofer. This is an arrangement we always like for simplicity’s sake, removing the need to site a large subwoofer speaker box somewhere in the room and then attempt to integrate it properly from all key listening positions.
The Bar’s 5.0 designation comes from five racetrack-shaped drivers each 80×48mm. Three of these fire forward from the front of the centre section, which also contains all the electronics within, the connections behind and the touch buttons on top for power, volume and source.
The other two drivers fire sideways at an angle from.” (We asked what this ‘brainstorming’ technology does, exactly, but nobody seemed to know.)
