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Sonos is known for its premium, high-end smart speakers that fit into its existing ecosystem of audio products, and it only sells a few models. Meanwhile, JBL's speakers are generally more outdoor-oriented, and you can find both high-end party speakers as well as budget-friendly portable models in their lineup. The lower two woofers play up to 800 Hz, but the uppermost woofer plays up to 1.8 kHz where it hands over playback to the tweeter. The high-pass filter to the tweeter uses a 3rd-order slope while the low-pass going from the wide-range woofer uses a fourth-order slope, and the two lower woofers are low-pass filtered by a 2nd-order slope. The advantage of this 2.5-way design is low-frequency headroom is increased with the additional woofer.
It gets a touch louder, with slightly less compression at max volume, and has a slightly wider-sounding soundstage, though these slight differences aren't too noticeable. The Ultimate Ears HYPERBOOM is a better speaker for music than the JBL PartyBox Encore Essential overall. The Ultimate Ears can get louder with significantly less compression present at max volume, so the audio quality is cleaner when you blast your music.
Best Mid-Range JBL Speaker
It can play stereo content without downmixing it to mono, so you can hear sound effects and instruments moving from one side of the speaker to the other. For example, if a song has the guitar on the left and the cymbals on the right, you'll hear the guitar coming from the left side of the Encore Essential and the cymbals from the right. However, it has a narrow and directional-sounding soundstage since it only projects audio from the front side of the speaker, as opposed to speakers with 360-degree designs. As a result, your audio sounds slightly different when listening from different angles, like when you're listening from behind the speaker. The cloth edge above the JBL logo sports three rather high-profile buttons for adjusting the volume and playback.
The JBL Clip 4 is a great alternative to the GO 3 for listeners who want an even louder output and more robust, versatile carry system. The Clip features an integrated carabiner that’s easy to operate single-handedly when placing it onto a backpack. Sound quality is quite good for a speaker this small, and while the bass response won’t blow you away, it will satisfy you more than what the GO 3 has to offer. The JBL GO 3 is a Bluetooth speaker that uses the 5.1 firmware to connect to your device of choice. It only supports the SBC codec, which is a little disappointing, but not terribly surprising—outdoor speakers rarely go in for high-quality codecs like aptX or AAC. This is fine seeing how the GO 3 serves as an adventure speaker, though you may run into some audio-visual lag if you watch videos while paired to it.
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This is easy to use, and a big improvement over the JBL GO 2 as an outdoor speaker. The JBL GO 3 and GO 2 are very different products, with dramatically different looks and a handful of differences under the hood, as well. As we mention above, the JBL GO 3 brings an IP67 rating, a step up from the GO 2’s IPX7 rating, which guarantees a great degree of water resistance but offers no dust resistance. Plenty of Bluetooth speakers make pretty incremental changes with successive entries, so it’s a little surprising to see how much of a departure the JBL GO 3 represents. In many ways, this portable Bluetooth speaker has more in common with something like the UE WONDERBOOM line than with the rather plain plastic rectangle that is the GO 2.
The new GO 3 is a mostly plastic affair, as before, but it comes with quite a few new physical features. The speaker comes in a rounded, oval-esque form, covered in tight-knit fabric and rubberized plastic. Just like the GO 2, the sound comes out of one side , with the other covered in a plastic patch so the speaker can lay flat without sliding around.
Appearance
You also don't need to keep it connected to a power outlet for it to work since it's battery-powered, which gives you the flexibility to bring the speaker with you wherever the party calls you. I found the packaging and protection to be good on these speakers, and it was designed to make the unboxing process pretty straightforward. This might not sound like a selling point, but when you unpack and re-pack as many pieces of audio gear that we reviewers do, you find that it actually does add to the value of the product itself. The subject of this review is the JBL HDI-3800 floor-standing loudspeaker, which is the flagship of the company’s brand new HDI line of speakers.
Ugly or beautiful, I wanted to know how close the HDI-3800s could come to the real thing, assuming the sound mix would allow that. I had heard a lot of good things about the movie ‘Knives Out,’ a 2019 whodunit comedy about a family’s murderous squabbling over the family estate after the death of the patriarch. From the beginning, ‘Knives Out’ was a joy to watch, and the HDI-3800 reproduced the sound splendidly. No doubt they could easily be used in a dedicated home theater room, although it would be a shame to hide such good looking speakers behind a screen. There is not much else to say except that the HDI-3800 helped to provide a great movie-going experience, and that good movies like ‘Knives Out’ deserve a good technical presentation such as a superlative sound system. In my 24’ by 13’ listening room, I set up the speakers with stand-off distances between the back wall and sidewall, and equal distance between speakers and listening position.
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Now I’ll warn you that you may have trouble finding a CD-quality copy of this music. I wasn’t able to find one online (other than in a reduced-quality YouTube version). So I purchased a copy of the original vinyl album, then persuaded my audio amigo, Russell Coco, to rip the vinyl to CD-quality digital. Being a tinkerer, I immediately began fiddling with the HF and UHF adjusters on the front of the speakers. But I decided quickly that the 4349s sounded most neutral with those tone controls at their zero positions, and left them alone after that.
I remember getting to hear the JBL L100 for the first time at their display at CES a few years ago and was blown away that they put in Molly Hatchet’s Flirtin’ With Disaster for me to listen to. That to me was a proper demo, particularly with the speaker that they were showing off. So in a nod to that, I made sure to spend some time with similar music that we all love so much and have played thousands of times over the years. I remember this as a song that I could listen to in stereos in my early days to judge how much I liked the system. With the driving bass, catchy tune, and David Byrne’s unique vocal presentation, it just tempted you to try to avoid bouncing your head, tapping your feet, and playing the drums! When I turned it on at moderate levels, I thought it sounded pretty good with solid bass and clear but non-fatiguing highs.
Basically, take care of your product and you’ll get the best results for the longest time. Whether you’re comfortable connecting your playlist via Bluetooth or you want to go old school and plug it in, this PartyBox accommodates either option with the addition of a USB playlist option. Working from the original design of the first model, the JBL Xtreme 2 adds new elements of style to an already killer speaker system.
The JBL Flip 5 brings all the fun, party features of the previous model but with some funky new customization aspects that make all the difference. Overall, JBL makes portable Bluetooth speakers with a solid, sturdy build and a neutral sound profile. However, you don't have much control over the sound profiles of their older models.
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