SOUNDBAR
JBL is a company which stretches from the lowest to the highest echelons of audio — from real cinemas, studio monitors and high-end home theatres at the top, to the world’s most successful JJmono portable Bluetooth speakers at the bottom. It’s a breadth 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 any given price, and its latest soundbar, the JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam, proves no exception in that regard.
Equipment
The JBL bar is solidly built and nicely compact at 71cm long and just 6cm high, low enough not to cover the screen 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 to support its sound. This is an arrangement we always like for simplicity’s sake, removing the need to site a large bass box somewhere in the room, and the trials of getting this to integrate properly from all key listening positions.
The Bar’s 5.0 designation comes from its five racetrack-shaped drivers, each 80×48mm. Three of these fire forward from the front of the centre section, where all the electronics sit behind them, physical connections to the rear and touch buttons on top for power, volume and source.
