Let’s take a look at perhaps the most incredible museum-grade pair of speakers I’ve ever seen – a pair of legendary JBL 4344 studio monitors!

Welcome back everyone and, as promised, I hope you enjoy this amusing story, brought to you by Liquid Audio and a friend and customer of mine whose hi-fi equipment I’ve featured here many times.

The incredible response to my brief one-photo teaser of these incredible speakers tells me a lot of you will enjoy this story. People use terms like NOS and museum-grade often, but when I use them, I mean it. You’ll see…

Background

Tim has been using a pair of Yamaha NS-1000M monitors I’ve upgraded for him for many years now and he loves them as much as I love my pair. Yamaha NS-1000s are incredibly good speakers revealing improvements in equipment that verify just how resolving they are.

Like me, Tim listens to a lot of deep, dark metal, electronic music, film scores, indie, rock, etc. As can happen, he got the itch for something new and even better, as I did. Typically for NS-1000 owners, this will revolve around wanting a greater sense of scale, deeper bass, more midrange presence, etc.

Unlike the ‘sensible’ pair of B&W Nautilus 803s I bought, Tim wanted something crazy, something epic, a once-in-a-lifetime purchase of something that sonically can’t be achieved any other way. That meant something much bigger than I could fit into my room…

We had extensive discussions and concluded that the main areas of improvement that he was looking for were in the deep bass, punch, scale, gravitas and ‘there-in there-in-the-room’ presence. There were a few options but nothing new with the quality he wanted and at a price he could afford.

It’s hard to better the NS-1000s without spending a lot of money but we kept coming back to larger speakers from legendary manufacturer JBL. With their massive cabinets, huge bass drivers, and high sensitivity, you can get incredible sonic results in the right room and with the right system.

Solution

I/we concluded that a pair of the JBL studio or home speakers would be perfect and the incredible JBL 4344 studio monitors seemed ideal. These epic monitors were used mostly in recording studios to monitor the sound being recorded by artists in studios.

Tim then went hunting and he certainly found the best pair imaginable. He purchased his pair of JBL 4344s directly from Japan and then shipped them by sea to Australia, saving thousands of dollars in freight. I won’t go into the exact methodology here.

Japanese hi-fi fans are crazy about JBLs and for good reason. They often cram them into tiny rooms they are completely unsuited to, such is the passion the Japanese have for JBL’s horn-loaded speakers, especially the biggest ones.

Horn-loaded designs like the JBL 4344 offer many advantages and some disadvantages. I won’t go too far into that here as it is not the purpose of the article. I will say though that large speakers with large bass drivers and high sensitivity do things that other speakers, especially small modern ones cannot.

I love deep bass and to do it properly you need big speakers. If you think that a little Devaliet system can do it, no matter what it might say on paper, “You’ve been had” as John Lydon once said. You just have to get the room and system right. Tim has the system right, but not the room. More on that later!

JBL 4344 Specifications

Adapted and improved, from the Audio Database

Unboxing

Purchasing speakers like this, or any high ticket item, sight unseen, with little information available is a leap of faith to some extent. You need good advice, a good sense of a ‘good deal’ and fairly big balls.

These things had to be freighted from Japan to Sydney by sea and from Sydney to Perth by road. They arrived palletised as one would expect of speakers this big and heavy.

First Listen

So, on a 43-degree day, in a room with very little AC, after moving two 100kg speakers into place, we fired up Tim’s class A Accuphase A-65 power amplifier, Accuphase C-280V preamplifier, Accuphase DP-77 SACD player and Kenwood L-07D turntable. Yes, to say this room was ‘warm’ is like saying these speakers are ‘big’..!

We first listened to the JBL 4344s on their own and then with the Yamaha NS-1000s and alternated between them. At first, the overwhelming problem for me was the poor room acoustics, made worse by the fact that the HF lenses needed their velcro backing reglued and couldn’t be properly used right away.

My brain took a few minutes to come to terms with this as I’ve improved my listening room to the point where it is acoustically excellent and everything in Tim’s room is affected by fairly brutal reflections which mess with imaging and balance. Once we’d streamed a few lossless high-resolution files and played a couple of electronic records though, I was able to get a sense of these beasts.

Tim’s Thoughts

Here is a quote from the owner of these impressive JBL 4344 studio monitors:

I love the JBL 4344’s bass control. They have no problem delivering the most bass heavy music, from doom metal to the electronic and everything in between.

I’ve owned Yamaha Ns1000s for nearly ten years and the 4344s are much better. More like NS1000s on steroids!

From the most beautiful highs to the floor shaking lows, they deliver.

Tim C

Liquid Mike’s Thoughts

Bass is outrageous. I sent some test tones through the system to confirm correct operation of these newly acquired beauties and a 25Hz tone was reproduced cleanly, with rippling power and not the slightest hint of strain. LF test tones played through the 4344s vibrate your internal organs in a way most other speakers can only dream of. But look at the size of these things!

Remember, a lot of music was mastered on these, for a reason. They aren’t designed for domestic environments. Modern small plastic drivers simply can’t move air like this, because they don’t have the 20Hz free air resonance or huge cone area of the JBL bass driver. You have to hear speakers like this to appreciate the epic gut punch they are capable of.

If you genuinely had the choice, would you choose the puny 6-inch plastic-framed bass drivers new speakers have, over a 10kg 15-inch massive all-metal beast like the 2235H woofer in the JBL 4344s? No thanks! But that’s the problem. Modern design ethos and labour costs have removed that choice for most. Show me where you can go and buy something like these JBL 4344s and not need to take out a second mortgage!

The current JBL L100 Mk2 reissue for example is not even in the same universe as these 4344s, and yet costs $9,000 AUD! JBL still manufactures large, premium hi-fi speakers, but you pay for them. Frustratingly you cannot easily even find them easily, because so few people are spending the money you’d need own them. The closest thing to the 4344s from JBL is probably these epic JBL K2 S9900s, which retail for around $90,000 AUD, new.

The midrange is especially impressive here, thanks in large part to the 4-way design and excellent performance of the 25cm midrange drivers in the 4344s. Highs are crystalline in their purity due and extended, thanks to the low distortion and wide coverage achieved by the two high-sensitivity compression drivers devoted to the HF section of the frequency spectrum.

I made various level adjustments to each of the mid, high and ultra-high frequency drivers after sending a few more test tones through and we listened and considered the effects of those adjustments. Ultimately all of that will need to be adjusted again, with test tones, in their final destination, which isn’t this room.

So, how do they sound and how do they compare to the NS-1000s? Amazing, with incredible presence and effortless deep bass that the much smaller Yammies cannot reproduce, through no fault of their own, of course.

Physics limits what can be achieved by any speaker and a 30 kg speaker, less than one-third the cabinet volume of the JBL 4344s, and with a 12-inch bass driver compared to the JBL’s 15-inch driver with a much heavier motor cannot compete in terms of scale and gravitas.

The NS-1000s did very well and sounded lovely in comparison, smooth and punchy, but smaller and less engaging, as one would expect. In isolation, you’d be very happy with them, but I can completely see why Tim will be sticking with his glorious new JBL 4344s! Of course, he has a buyer for the NS-1000s already lined up, no surprises there.

In terms of partnering equipment, it should go without saying that speakers of this calibre need to be matched with electronics of a similar calibre. Because of their excellent 93dB/Watt sensitivity, an amplifier like the nominally 60 Watts per channel Accuphase A-65 can drive these to monstrous levels, as I advised Tim before he purchased the JBLs.

I wouldn’t go with much less power but a really good 30 – 40 Watt class A amplifier would be fine, up to several hundred Watts with regular A/B amplifiers when used carefully of course. Naturally, with a high-resolution speaker like the JBL 4344 or the Yamaha NS-1000, sources and preamplifiers must be of the highest quality.

Final Thoughts

What more can you say about a purchase like this? The number of likes and comments I received for my brief teaser of these amazing loudspeakers says a lot about the esteem the JBL 4344s are held in even, today. It also says something about the blandness of the current speaker marketplace, dominated by what seems like endless narrow ‘spouse-and-decor-friendly’ designs.

This pair of museum-condition JBL 4344 loudspeakers is one of the most amazing hi-fi purchases I’ve ever seen or heard, and I’ve seen and heard a few in my time. Considering that these came in landed at well under $10K AUD, and considering the mostly ordinary Chinese speakers that even $10K buys you new, these are simply a bona fide hi-fi bargain, it’s that simple.

You just have to find a good pair and that can take many months of intensive searching, and then import them, that’s the problem. Many 4344s and other classic JBL monitors are also tired and in need of a refurb, or have been dropped or damaged. This pair have had their bass and midrange driver’s foam surrounds replaced, a regular maintenance requirement of foam-surround drivers.

The pedigree of these speakers, the recording studio heritage, the high sensitivity and low power requirements, the condition, the 10kg woofers, the 4-way design with individual driver level adjustments and bi-amplification capability, the list goes on. These things are phenomenal but they are not for everyone or every room.

Many spouses wouldn’t ‘allow’ these (LOL) and many rooms wouldn’t accommodate them. Many lower-grade hi-fi systems would simply not do them justice. As with any high-resolution hi-fi piece, you need premium partnering equipment to enjoy these beauties at their best, and a large and well-treated listening room.

For those whose setups and relationships meet these requirements, there are few better or more iconic choices of loudspeaker than the JBL 4344.

Thanks!

As always, thank you for visiting, for reading and for supporting me in creating content like this. From what Tim and I can gather, there is nothing like this article (or many of my articles for that matter) available anywhere else, at the time of writing.

My goal is to continue to create unique content like this, but it takes far more time and energy than most people realise, an entire day for this article for example. If you enjoyed this, you can support me by subscribing, making a donation, commenting, sharing and engaging me to work on your hi-fi equipment.

Thanks also to Tim for being such an excellent customer and supporter of Liquid Audio over many years.