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I tried JBL’s retro-cool wireless active speaker, and it rocked

1/4/2023

JBL launched a range of vintage-looking hi-fi components at CES 2023, all of it hearkening back to the brand’s 1960s-70s heyday when beefy knobs and wood side-panels were the norm. But the new JBL offering that most captured my attention – that hard-to-ignore Bluetooth-enabled, orange-plattered turntable aside – was the 4329P Studio Monitor Powered Loudspeaker.

The 4329P is a larger, more full-range follow-up to the 4305P Studio Monitor the company launched in summer 2022. Like that offering, the new model was designed to look like JBL’s vintage speakers, with a wide cabinet that in this instance houses a horn-loaded 1-inch compression driver and 8-inch paper cone woofer.

But the retro aspects of the 4329P’s design end there. The new JBL is a fully active speaker, with a built-in 300-watt amplifier supplying 250 watts to the woofer and 50 watts to the compression driver, with digital signal processing used to optimize the crossover between the two along with power handling.

Check out the full review from Tech Radar here

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