Inside the reliability testing all our pro speakers must survive

STORIES

We’re passionate about our JBL Professional speakers’ reliability—and we prove it with some tough love.

We love our pro speakers. We want what’s best for them—and we want musicians, sound engineers, audio integrators, and audiophiles everywhere to love and depend on them as much as we do.

But how do we guarantee our speakers bring nothing but iconic engineering, incredible sound quality, amazing longevity, and all-around good vibes? With love, of course. Tough love.

We don’t coddle our speakers when we design them. We’re not just kissing them gently, packaging them up, and sending them out to you. We don’t tell them they’re wonderful just for existing. We’re putting them through brutal testing that pushes each speaker beyond its limit, proves its long-lasting reliability, and ensures its sound quality will be at its very best in any audio setting.

Here’s how we do it—and why it’s worth it.

Bake Them…

… to well done temperature in two ginormous ovens. Think about where you’d might find those pro speakers. Hanging outdoors in a hot climate? Yes. Next time you’re outside, look around and look for that JBL logo on an outdoor speaker and think about the temperature variants that speaker goes through. Or, how about your favorite band on tour and their speaker gear is transported inside a blazing hot truck. You want those speakers to work? Yeah, so do we. And so does the band. So, we put them in ovens to simulate those conditions. Add in some water and we’re now testing for humidity. Put them in an ultraviolet light chamber, and now we’re testing for intense and prolonged sun exposure.

Shake Them…

Oh, yeah. Inside the truck where those speakers are baking? They’re also getting shaken because they are being driven around or carried. We need to be assured that no matter where we send the speaker, no matter how they’re being jostled, the speakers will turn on and work as designed.

Break Them…

Many of our professional speakers are part of a system that may be held together by a pole, locked to each other, or flown in the air by a bracket. Safety is paramount to people grooving to the music through these speakers, so we have a machine to simulate stress points. A big machine. This hydraulic-powered machine exerts up to 20,000lbs that pulls apart or bends our products in important places to find their failure point. Once we have that calculation, we exhaustively engineer the product to wayyyy beyond any real-life maximum stress put on these connection points.

The Most Brutal of Them All: The 100-Hour Power Test

The final gamut? 100 endless, grueling hours of straight playtime. And we’re not just playing “Mr. Brightside” on repeat. We lock our speakers in a specialized fireproof concrete chamber and play a non-stop test frequency for four days straight to really push our speakers as far as they'll go. No pause, no relief, no escape. After the speakers hiss or thump (for subwoofers) at deafening decibels for more than four days, the engineers will assess the results, redesign the system, rinse, and repeat. It’s JBL’s way of ensuring they’ll outlast any real-world applications with power and quality to spare.

A bittersweet goodbye

Only once our speakers survive the poking, prodding, and blasting, do we feel comfy with mass producing and shipping them out to you—our favorite musicians, audio engineers, and sound aficionados. They’ve proven they’ll last, give you top-notch quality, and look cool while doing it. With a quick kiss goodbye and a reminder that they are the true light in our lives, they’ll be on their way.

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