CEDIA 2013

I've spent a lot of time over the last two decades talking with the guys at Harman International, and I've never heard them so excited about a speaker as they are about the JBL M2, a new high-end professional recording monitor. At CEDIA Expo, JBL announced that it'll be selling the M2 for home systems, too, although in a substantially different and more elite package.

The M2 features a unique new horn shape coupled to a compression-type midrange/tweeter driver, with a 15-inch woofer handling everything below 800 Hz. I've never seen a speaker with such a flat measured frequency response. (You can see the chart here.) There's no internal crossover -- you have to biamp it, with separate amps for the woofer and the horn, and do the crossover at line level.

The pro version of the M2 is packaged with Crown amps rated at 600 watts per channel plus a separate crossover. The whole package for two speakers costs $20,000.

The $46,000 consumer package shown at the CEDIA Expo combines a pair of M2s with four Mark Levinson No 531H 300-watt monoblock amps and an SDEC 3000 digital EQ/crossover. The SDEC 3000 also allows an installer to do room correction on the speakers.