Recently we traveled to Florida to visit JL Audio. While we were there we shot the company's demo vehicle, a VW Gti, which readers saw featured in the August issue. The car wasn't the only reason we made that trip back east. We also wanted to find out just what makes JL Audio tick. It turned out to be an enlightening time. Any company that uses Apple computers throughout its business operations, from ad creation, design, and production tasks, is just cool on a fundamental level. And when they make products like the W7 series of woofers, they've taken things to another plateau. Their achievement embodies a major advancement in technological design. As it turns out, simplicity was the key to pure performance; function became the fashion. Kind of an oddity in a market dominated by flash-chrome and overzealous hype.
In a time of gross corporate consolidation, JL Audio remains a private company. Private does not imply small. They have a 110,000 sq. ft. facility in Miramar, Florida which is home to company headquarters, speaker assembly, cabinet assembly (wood and fiberglass) and speaker engineering. A facility in Phoenix, Arizona is dedicated to their electronics division and is home to engineering, distribution and repair facilities for these products. The engineering staff is headed by CEO Lucio Proni, who has led his team to collect ten U.S. Patents, with another ten currently pending for speaker and amplifier technology.
I started my first job in the car audio industry in 1994. While at our small competitive company we considered JL Audio's W6 series of woofers our rivals at the retail level. What I found so shocking after all this time is that in 1994 JL Audio had already started its research and development of what we now know as the W7! JL Audio was not in a rush to bring new product to the market, but rather set out to make technological advancements in speaker design. Focus on innovation, and the rest would take care of itself. That in a nutshell is what makes JL Audio very special.
What they spent so much time with is not just the development of a speaker but rather the technology and computer equipment (and facility) to track, map, plot, plan, theorize about endless possibilities in design, function and performance. Then they fabricate one-off prototypes in-house and test repeatedly with all types of computer monitoring gear (note: many of the programs were written and developed in-house). We nearly lost tech editor Casey Thorson's life and my left limb when I raised my camera to sneak a little photo of the massive amounts of computer equipment. Manville Smith (VP of marketing and technical services) jumped across this huge table and blindsided my man Casey to grab my camera. And for those of you who know Manville he is just that - MAN-ANVIL. Very funny now, but at the time it scared the heck out of me. Sorry, readers, no top secrets photos to share with you; but then, what we saw and what is presented here is plenty.
Manville diverted our attention from the mystery door by asking us if we needed some "lap-dances". "Seeing how you guys have all those advertisements with models, you guys must get the treatment", he said. "Step in here and please take your seats". As the lights started to dim I all of a sudden to my surprise felt some major vibration and I had a vision of this fine-ass W7 in my lap at full skirt excursion! JL Audio does not need sexy models in their ads, the W7 is equivalent to seven fine women in your lap! But sex appeal wasn't the driving idea behind the W7; rather it was all about sound quality and power handling. Now that is sexy and going back to some basics that this industry has gotten away from.