JBL Sovereign (1958)

Name: JBL Sovereign
Brand: JBL

The JBL Sovereign is one of the most ambitious loudspeakers the company ever built. It is a floor-standing, four-way, acoustic-suspension system, introduced at the 1958 New York High Fidelity Show. It was JBL's flagship, the top model in the Signature series, and Raymond Loewy styled it. His Space Age look gave the enormous cabinet a distinctive, futuristic appearance. The drivers sit on a slanting baffle for time alignment, and the whole thing weighed 165 pounds.

The Sovereign was designed for multi-amplification from the start. It used a passive crossover from 150 to 1500 Hz, but it was meant to be driven by separate amplifiers per driver section. That made it one of the first systems to offer an electronic crossover as an option. The drivers are twin 15-inch bass drivers in a sealed enclosure, a 12-inch low-midrange driver, and compression drivers for midrange and highs. A forum listing identifies them as the 075 high-frequency driver, the 375/375P midrange, a 150-4C low-mid, and 130A woofers.

The original list price was $840 in 1958. That was expensive for the day, and one source estimates a comparable modern system would run around $7,500. Audio (December 1969, p.74) noted the Sovereign's excellent horizontal dispersion and clear, forward quality, though it measured a 4 dB peak between 6 and 7 kHz on axis. J. Gordon Holt reviewed the system for Stereophile and called it "a truly fine reproducer." He found the bass a little heavy, and he noted the system was inefficient enough that a 50-watt amplifier was barely adequate. Production lasted only about a year.

The Sovereign competed with top models from Jensen, University, and Electro-Voice at the time. Its 375 compression driver is notoriously fragile, and the 075 tweeter's diaphragm is no longer available from JBL.

Dimensions: 52" W × 33" H × 22" D
Weight: 165 lbs
Crossover points: 150 Hz and 1500 Hz
Original price: $840 (1958)
Designed for bi-, tri-, or quad-amplification with electronic crossover