Quote Originally Posted by Thom
One shop could buy as many franchises as they wished, but they had to do a certain volume of business in each franchise to keep it. Selling a billion dollars worth of one, didn't qualify you for the other. The cabinets were still nicely made the veneers were real, but if you removed a driver it probably looked better than what you would take out of most speakers but it didn't look like anything JBL had ever used before. Then there were those funny looking square plastic ones, I've no idea what they were thinking. As for paying $400.00 for the pair, you make my point for me. That wasn't even close to being JBL money. In 73 the 100 was maybe 273 per ea when in arrived and that was nothing like an S7 system plus a cabinet or even there were some small speakers at the time consisted of an LE14 and a 175DLH it was over $400 per ea although you could buy a small cabinet with probably the sweetest full range 8 inch in it for less than a fortune but by then people were counting the speakers in the box to see how good it was. Back then JBL sad they would never make more than a 2 way system they said crossovers caused too much trouble. When they added an 075 they brought it in at 7000 and called it an augmented 2 way system because they said that was above any music fundimental.
I dunno Thom - for me it was the sound, tho the price helped, of course. I had been working in campus radio at the University of So Carolina and had been involved in upgrading the station. Although I had a set of large (original) Advents, I'd gotten very used to the sound of the JBL 4310 Monitors driven by SWTPC Tiger 01 amps (60 watts/ch, I believe). It really changed the way I heard music, and when I came back to DC a few years later, the Century 100s and Decade 36s were the closest thing to that sound - and I preferred the Decade 36s.
It sure seemed like they were superior to everything in that price range ($200-300 ea) - if you liked that hot sound (compared to the "dry" sound of the New England speaker companies) ...
I will admit - they did not have horns like the big box 4320s I bought earlier this year ...