Well, one things for sure, the JM designed CLR will go down as the most hyped monitor in human history.
IMHO the only ones hyping the CLR are everyone except JM and Atomic. Almost everything I've ever read by them on the CLR has been factual. The emphasis has been on specifications and behavior, not whether the CLR is the best thing since sliced bread. They say that the CLR puts the tweeter and woofer signals more in phase than competing products. They say the frequency response is 70Hz-18kHz, +/-2.5dB. They say that the max continuous SPL rating of 120 dB is actually accurate, unlike other products' ratings. They say that the CLR handles transient signals better than other products. All of these things are either true or false, and easily tested by their competitors. Whether these differences translate into a significant audible difference depends on the listener. The one time I've seen Jay describe the CLR in qualitative terms was when he and another TGPer compared Jay's personal monitor with a $1400 Turbosound monitor and both reported that Jay's monitor sounded better.
QuoteNo speaker ever built is more advanced than the CLR, no audio/speaker engineer since the advent of ears has come up with a more advanced speaker...
Jay has never said or implied this. I believe his other designs cost multiples of what the CLR costs, and I doubt he would say the CLR represents his most advanced design, or even more advanced than the designs of the competitors in his normal field (high-end institutional installations like IMAX, not consumer products). He's been frank about compromises that were made to keep costs down, like the decision to forego neo magnets.
Quoteone has to wonder how the Chinese were able to understand how to build this speaker of such great technology.
Anyone with a grade-school education can build something if they're told exactly what to do. The hard part is design and quality control.
QuoteAnd, if it doesn't sound as great as it's hyped to sound, then don't blame JM, blame yourself because you don't know what you're doing, or there's something wrong with your digital device.
I've never seen Jay say this. What he has said is that the proper job of a FRFR monitor is to accurately reproduce the signal it's given. So if a FRFR monitor is doing its job and a modeler sounds bad through it, it's the modeler that sounds bad and not the monitor. That's true regardless of whether it's a CLR, an RCF, a QSC or whatever.
When it comes to loudspeaker design, there's no one more knowledgeable than Jay that I've seen posting here, on TGP or anywhere else for that matter. And in the past he's contributed some really useful technical advice that no guitarists would have arrived at on their own (see the Mitchell Donut and the QSC K10 phase and EQ modifications). Someone more sales- and hype-oriented than Jay could have easily turned the Mitchell Donut into a product line like Weber did with the Beam Blocker. I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt it comes to delivering on promises that the CLR will offer what he says it does. Anyway, I'll be sure to post my thoughts when I get mine.
