JBL L212 Speaker Ad

Old magazine ad for JBL speakers. Circa 1977.

JBL CHANGES THE PICTURE OF SOUND.

You've never heard anything like it. Not from us. Not from anyone.  JBL'S new L212: a totally new picture of high performance sound, from the people who wrote the book.

You hear the whole sound first. And when you catch your breath you search for words to describe the depth, the detail, the etched precision of the music.
That stunning pair of three-way speakers is sending clean, undistorted sound to every corner of the room.  At every frequency. At every level. Loud or soft.  High or low. It doesn't matter. The energy is constant.
You're experiencing three-dimensional imaging: Vocal up front. Lead guitar two steps back and one to the left. Drums further back. The piano closer, almost off right edge of the sound. Suddenly you're aware of a fullness in the music that you’ve heard before but never associated with recorded sound.

The bass!  You’ve been hearing all of the bass, all of the fundamental tones you couldn’t bring home from the concert.  It’s not only everything you’ve heard before. It’s everything you haven’t.  The music is rich with sound at the lowest limit of your hearing.

Then you see the third speaker.  The hero of the piece: The Ultrabass.

The Ultrabass is a system in itself – woofer, amplifier, equalizer and enclosure – designed, mated, blended to do one thing perfectly: reproduce sound at the threshold of sub-sonic frequencies.

It brings all the low frequency music within audible range, balancing it perfectly with the rest of the music.  Without boominess. Without resonance.  It also electronically sums left and right signals below 70 Hz – virtually eliminating turntable rumble and record warp noise.  And, because of the non-directional character of the low frequency sound, the Ultrabass can be placed almost anywhere in the room.  Without any loss of the three-dimensional imaging.

The Ultrabass pays one final dividend: it allows the two three way speakers to be specialists, too.  They can concentrate on the top 95% of the music (Listen to the whole system, and you’ll hear what that means.  Even at a rug curling, rock concert loudness, you’ll get a clarity, a smoothness, an enthusiasm for detail you’ve never heard before.)
Finally, you look for the monster amplifier that’s driving all that sound.  There isn’t one. The L212 takes one fourth the power you’d need with a conventional low efficiency loudspeaker.

That’s the story.  What you’ve been reading about is, essentially, a no-compromise loudspeaker system. The only compromise is the price. The L212 is an expensive loudspeaker system. (the L212 may take a little while becoming a household word.)

In the meantime, we have one suggestion: Contact the JBL Distributor in your country and he’ll be happy to provide you with all the technical information on the L212 including an engineering staff report from JBL.
Nothing fancy except the specs.
You’ve never heard anything like it. Not from Us. Not from anyone.  JBL (logo)

James B. Lansing Sound, Inc., 8500 Balboa Boulevard, Northridge, California 91329