This the best speaker BestBuy have in inventory.

[skeptic]

"Besides, most customers don't want really accurate speakers anyway and wouldn't know one if it hit them over the head"

Skeptic! we agree on this point (Your tally will be updated to reflect this)
The JBL "Signature Sound" was in place long before I got there, and will be there for many years to come. It just gets spiced up or toned down depending on the target audience.

"he can give them a story about breaking them in or switching to vinyl or buying a tube amplifier "

Vinyl and tubes aren't for everybody. I like them, but I'm not into the "old tube" sound, nor the "old vinyl" sound which is what you describe. Things have changed out there.

"or special cables to roll off the high end"

Skeptic, you have just stepped into the "doo-doo". You have now admitted to coming over to my side of the cable debate. It IS possible to build cables to tune a system, there can be differences, and often those differences are destructive in nature. Don't you feel better now? (Your tally will be updated to reflect this)

Do I have to keep saying it? Tuning or equalizing a sound system by changing cables has got to be the dumbest, most expensive, least predictable, least controllable, least efficient way there is to do it assuming that it can be done at all.

Spiced up or toned down, the target audience is that segment of the market that particular product is aimed at. The high end doesn't want accuracy any more than the low end. If you want to see who wants accuracy just check the kind of music they are listening to. If it's classical, there is a good chance they want accurate. If it's jazz, there is still a possibility but don't count on it. Anything else and the term doesn't even have a meaning.

JBL and its sister company Alec Lansing was originally a supplier of theater speakers. Loud, efficient, utterly reliable, and not particularly accurate, they didn't have to be, until the mid 1950s recorded sound didn't contain anything above 8 khz. The basic 2 way horn design was their signature. Their ultimate design was the Hartsfield. Frankly, if I were looking for a great toy or ambitious enough to build one for myself, I'd go for a Paragon.

Klipsch's ultimate speaker which the Hartsfield was designed to compete head to head against was and still is the Klipschorn. But the JBL used higher quality drivers. The Altec A7 voice of the theater is another one in that league and let's not forget Tannoy's dual gold concentric monitor, also in that same market. The revolution towards accuracy began in the 1950s with AR and KLH. By introducing the Acoustic suspension design and dome tweeters, there was a possibilty for making much better more accurate speakers and they fit in most homes unlike the big horns. But the limits of that paradyme were completely exploited by the 1980s and while materials have improved and some slight conceptual improvements have been made like Linquist Riley crossover networks and Theil Small modeling for ported designs, not much of real significance has happened. Today's me too designs just don't seem to offer much promise of better things to come either. Basically, what started out as a hobby for some poineers in this area or was a transistion from pro sound to exploit a consumer market has died of its own commercial success.

As for vinyl tubes, I've had a lifetime of them, still have them in my basement but as far as I'm concerned, while they bring back the nostalgia of my youth, as pretenders to being state of the art, they basically suck.

[spacedeckman]

Lansing went from Altec to found JBL. There was a lot of shared technology due to the whole egress/founding thing. Lansing (Martini actually) brought many of his patents with him. Altec was originally All Technical Services. The only common thread between them was James B Lansing.

As for changes, the biggest have come in the form of tweeters. 20 years ago, tweeters sucked. Now, many suck, but, there are some good ones out there. Otherwise, computers and computer modeling have changed a lot of things. Companies can now make drivers specifically for a speaker with different voice coils and motor geometrys to do very specific things. An engineered roll-off allows the use of a simpler crossover, less is more. I hold out more hope than you, but the contamination of marketing and loss of interest in quality will be audio's ultimate demise. Sony is already finding that out with SACD. The "revolution" that they are going to cram down everyone's throat in a couple of years due to lack of interest in better sound. MP3 is the "hot thing", and that is only acceptable at best as far as sound quality goes at the highest bit rates. There just aren't many out there who care anymore.

I've known a bunch of old guys with "Voice of the Theater" systems. Never any Hartsfield guys though. All that fancy wood stuff went away when the head wood working guy died. Sorry, I don't recall his name. But speaker "sculpture" had pretty much died by then anyway.