JBL Bar 5.0 Multibeam soundbar
JBL’s solidly-built soundbar packs in the features and requires no separate subwoofer to deliver the goods.
JBL’s solidly-built soundbar packs in the features for movies and music, and requires no separate subwoofer to deliver the goods.
JBL is a company which stretches from the lowest to the highest echelons of audio, from real cinemas, studio monitors and high-end home cinema at the top, to the world’s most successful mono portable Bluetooth speakers at the bottom. It’s a size of operation which gives it an advantage in terms of economies of scale, in technology licensing — it probably doesn’t hurt, either, to be owned by Harman, with all its broad expertise across multiple audio brands, and beyond that by Samsung, with its extended technology strengths and massive marketing reach.
In short, JBL invariably offers more than you might expect at a given price, and its latest soundbar, the JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam, proves no exception.
Equipment
The JBL bar is solidly built and nicely compact at 71cm long and just 6cm high, low enough not to interfere with the screen real estate of all but the very lowest-slung TVs when on a bench-top, and further neatened in many ways by being a bar which requires no subwoofer. This is an arrangement we always like for simplicity’s sake, removing the need to site a large subwoofer speaker box somewhere in the room and then attempt to integrate it properly from all key listening positions.
The Bar’s 5.0 designation comes from five racetrack-shaped drivers each 80×48mm. Three of these fire forward from the front of the centre section, which also contains all the electronics within, the connections behind and the touch buttons on top for power, volume and source.
The other two drivers fire sideways at an angle from the ends of the curving cabinet, and it is these which gives the bar its ‘MultiBeam’ moniker. Images on JBL’s website show sound from the speaker blasting forward as three channels from the centre plus sideways, bouncing off side walls to reach the listener from far out wide, if not actually behind you. Indeed the lead-off for this bar’s PR tells that it is “designed to deliver an incredibly spacious 3D soundscape with the first-ever combination of virtual Dolby Atoms [sic] and JBL’s proprietary brainstorming technology.”
(We asked what this ‘brainstorming’ technology does, exactly, but nobody seemed to know.)
Right near the start of the Bar’s instruction manual there is a room diagram specifying a room width of four metres and a listening distance of 2.5-3 metres. So will the Bar not deliver its incredibly spacious 3D soundscape unless you have a room that size and shape? We asked Harman, which replied that “These are meant as an ideal
set of parameters, not a hard and fast rule, but meant as a relative guide. You will get good results in other size rooms.”
And to assist in those good results, there is a calibration system, rather impressive in a bar of this price. With Automatic MultiBeam Calibration (AMC), “your surround sound experience can be optimized for your favorite seating position”, says the manual.
In addition to those five racetrack active drivers, there are four passive 75mm bass radiators, positioned in two opposed pairs firing up and down (see cutaway diagram overleaf). While the racetrack drivers each get 50W of power (quoted with 1% THD), the passive drivers merely move in sympathy with the energy inside the cabinet coming from the back of the active drivers. So while there are speakers on the top of the bar, they are nothing to do with Atmos or height information. The Atmos implementation here is virtual; Atmos signals will be decoded and then delivered from the five active drivers with some Dolby virtualisation magic to convince ears and brain there is more going on than there really is.
There are two ways the Bar can receive a Dolby Atmos signal. The first is via an HDMI connection to your TV, playing back down the wire via eARC, the enhanced version of HDMI’s Audio Return Channel, which can now handle multichannel surround. For this to work you will require eARC on your TV, which presupposes a decent recent model. If your TV has the earlier ARC, this delivers stereo only, but you can still give the Bar Atmos by plugging a media player or Blu-ray player into the other HDMI socket. We plugged in an AppleTV 4K to this input, and later a 4K Blu-ray player, both capable of delivering Atmos from suitable soundtracks. The JBL will play the audio and pass the 4K video through to your TV; this includes full passthrough of HDR information, including Dolby Vision.
There is also an optical input, in case you don’t have any HDMI ARC at all, or lest it doesn’t work. Optical can carry some basic surround formats, though not Atmos, nor multichannel PCM. Most TVs will deliver straight stereo this way.
So those are the connection choices when playing video, but the JBL Bar 5.0 is a two-trick pony, loaded with options for music playback as well. Round the back is an Ethernet connection, along with built-in dual-band Wi-Fi, and once networked the Bar offers built-in Chromecast audio streaming and also Apple’s AirPlay 2, each of which offer full CD-quality or better streaming from smart devices. There’s also Bluetooth, if not to the same quality, given no codecs available above the baselevel SBC (i.e. no AAC or aptX). But with Chromecast and AirPlay 2, there’s really no reason to use Bluetooth other than convenience or for un-networked visitors.
The last rear socket is a USB-A slot, which in the USA supports MP3 file playback, but not here — “based on parts availability, cost, and/or feedback that particular options are not required”, we were told. It’s no great loss. The slot can be used for firmware updates, but these are more easily applied over the internet.
Performance
Once we’d struggled awhile with the supplied remote control’s less than easily removable battery compartment, we plugged up the bar and powered it up. Initial set-up was a little extended, with words like LOAD appearing on the Bar’s user-friendly LED display, then WAIT… which we did, examining the Quick Start Guide while we waited; this reassuringly indicated that some of those messages might appear, but lacked many actual words of instruction, JBL opting for the pictorial style of instruction book, the kind which aims to be understood in all languages but often ends up being universally incomprehensible instead. There was no full manual nor a link to one either (“All indications we have is that the majority of customers do not generally look at full manuals in paper format”, said Harman when we asked about this), but we found it online easily enough. By now the bar’s LEDs were announcing a series of rising percentages — 20%, 30%, up to 100%, then WAIT again, for a long time this time, then LOAD again… then nothing.
After a while we tried the power button — not always sensible when a firmware update is apparently underway, but yes, ‘HELLO’, it said.
We had made the HDMI eARC connection to our eARC-compatible Samsung TV, which announced a ‘receiver’ attached — we selected it, but still no sound. We tried optical from the TV and that worked immediately. Oddly we later removed the optical cable and the HDMI ARC then burst into life, and worked thereafter. So if at first you don’t succeed, as they say, have a good fiddle.
We then had a go at the Automatic MultiBeam Calibration. Here the manual indicates with its pictograms that you hold down the HDMI button for five seconds until CALIB appears on the LED display, which it did, followed by around 30
“it presented a full atmospheric soundstage with fairly accurate voices, a good underpinning of bass strength, and effective screen-wide movement...”
seconds of calibration whoops. With this, says the guide in one of its rare bursts of words, “your surround sound can be optimized for your favourite seating position”. But how did it know where we were seated? What microphone was it using to monitor the whoops? Answer was there none from the guide. We thought perhaps the remote control had a mike inside — and that the JBL Bar was now carefully optimising its audio for someone lying with their head on the coffee table. But we needn’t have worried, When we checked with JBL, they told us that “The calibration process is automated, it sends out signals and receives via an internal mic. It creates virtual mapping of the dimensions of the room to fulfil the best MultiBeam parameters of function.”
Which is clever enough, really, though it is not “optimising for your favourite seating position” — as the Bar can have no idea where you’re planning to sit.
Calibration done, we were keen to compare the results with the raw uncalibrated sound of the bar — most calibration systems allow an easy toggling to see if you prefer the sound before or after. But this isn’t possible here; indeed the only way to return to uncalibrated sound is a complete reset of the Bar. “The goal here” Harman told us, “is to create the simplest possible set-up for the consumer — basically
a set and forget process.” So that’s how we listened for the first week, calibrated and running day-to-day TV viewing.
We were also regularly trying the dedicated ‘Atmos’ button on the remote control to test its effects on programming of all types. This turns on Virtual Atmos, the other magic trick here, which can be toggled on and off for easy comparison. It doesn’t require the Bar to be receiving a bona fide Atmos soundtrack; it’s virtual, so it works on anything.
We were never quite satisfied. JBL’s preferred sound curve tends to soften the top-end, which doesn’t help dialogue achieve cut-through, and we were constantly bothered by a feeling of mild disorientation indicating that something was at least partly out of phase.
Furthermore it quickly became clear that the Bar was not simply using the front three speakers as LCR and the side speakers to bounce surround channels from your wall. We played Dammit Janet from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ on Blu-ray, which has a surround mix using five (seven, if you have them) channels very discreetly — in this song Brad and Janet sing only from the centre channel, the main thrust of music comes from L and R, while strings and electric piano are isolated in the rears. But getting up close to the JBL Bar, it was clear that bits of the L and R were also coming from the side speakers. We tried 5.1 and Atmos test tracks, and confirmed that for the left channel it seemed that much of the treble content was coming from wide left, while a soft version came from at least one of the three central drivers. Even isolated centrechannel audio was leaking from the wide sides.
Was this because we had calibrated the JBL? We did a full reset, and yes, the channel paths were then more clearly defined — no centre leakage at all, if not quite an entire clarity of separation.
Then we discovered that following a full reset, the Virtual Atmos effect is ‘on’ by default. We turned this off, and thereby enjoyed far more clearly separated five-channel sound. More or less. There was still a little spread between channels, and judging from Fraunhofer test-track voices the surround channels seemed to be granted no bass content — or were running out of phase.
Conclusion — if you like things more or less as the sound engineer intended, don’t do the auto-calibration and don’t use the Virtual Atmos. If you want to hear what effects JBL can add, go ahead and play. After all, resetting takes only about a minute (though it removes all personal settings, so if you’re on Wi-Fi or Chromecast, you’ll have to set those up again afterwards).
We much preferred our listening after the decalibration. The sound was brighter, improving vocal intelligibility. Did our TV pass Atmos from Netflix down eARC? It seemed to for The Woman in the Window, with the Bar scrolling a message that it was receiving multichannel PCM at least (the same message as when playing Atmos from Blu-ray), and it presented a full and large atmospheric soundstage with fairly accurate tonal voices, a good underpinning of bass strength, and effective screen-wide movement from left to right. We never heard sounds from much further afield than around a metre either side of the Bar, nor height, whether or not we added the Virtual Atmos function. There was one exception — the Dolby Atmos ‘Leaf’ demo, where certain effects did gain very wide and even surround positioning. As the swish of the sycamore seed passed behind the listening position it disappeared entirely, but it picked up from a position perhaps E-S-E of our head — impressive, even if it’s test material rather than an actual soundtrack; the only other front-based bar we’ve heard deliver such width is Sennheiser’s whackingly more expensive Ambeo. We’d note also that our room was also two metres wider than the suggested four metres, which might affect the ‘bounce’ of sound, so the effect may be still more apparent in JBL’s ‘ideal’ scenario.
We also played many hours of music through the JBL bar. Electronic mixes were perhaps the most enjoyable, with an impressive emission of bass during the downward slides of the Cornelius mix of The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, playing over AirPlay from Qobuz. Bass drops away only in the 50s of hertz, pretty good for a bar without a sub.
Open acoustic music also emerges with warmth and openness. Bad Times Good, the opener of the new Crowded House album, is a small-scale song with tight clarity and ethereal harmonies which the Bar 5.0 presented pleasingly up to a medium level; beyond that the bass became overdominant and tended to mask the detail behind Neil’s vocals. The second track, Playing With Fire, started well, but its complexity soon flattened out the Bar’s sound, so that while it was capable of making a fair old noise, there was little openness and almost nothing in the way of real dynamics. The ‘Atmos’ option is disabled for music streaming.
To finish up we tried calibration again. The effect this time was to sharpen up the midrange; we compared Leonard Cohen’s ‘Live in London’ take of Tower of Song before and after, and calibration imparted an edge towards sibilance in Cohen’s vocal and a sense of artificiality, bringing back the phasey ‘suck out’ effect we’d heard in the previous calibration.
Conclusion
JBL has squeezed a huge amount into this bar, and impressively it’s all handled without resort to any app of its own. The calibration may be a step too far, given its irreversibility and sometimes negative effects on clarity during our listening, while the Bar’s claims for ‘3D sound’, whatever that may be, were not much borne out by our listening either. Yet it’s a solid enough bar, certainly well-stocked, and enjoyable if not sophisticated for music streaming at most levels, while for TV and movies we found its sound to be best with a high-quality soundtrack, able to play enjoyably to quite high levels, especially when taken back to its non-calibrated state of clarity. It’s not our favourite bar even at this reasonable price, but it certainly offers a high-value combination between facilities and sound quality.