Jazz Speakers J9940 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System

Introduction

By now I’m sure no one needs any special introduction as to who Jazz Hipster Corporation really is. Just to get the ball rolling however, Jazz speakers a subsidiary of Jazz Hipster, are one of the largest manufactures currently in Taiwan who are exclusively in the business of producing multimedia speaker systems. A couple of months back we reviewed one of their 3-piece speaker systems, the J8902. For the price that system is offered, it’s certainly one of the best investments you can put in your money on in that range.

However systems like the J8902 simply do not cut out for hardcore audiophiles, whose very existence is relied upon earth shattering music. For this category Jazz speakers offer a range of systems which far exceeds our expectations. Take a look at their newest speaker system, the J9940W, it’s simply mind boggling. Wireless speakers!!!who would have known….

Today we bring to you the first model released in the J9940 series, which is pretty much the same as the current versions except for a few minor features. Make note that the J9940 we’re looking at today is a 5.1 system, yet it does not include 5.1 decoding. More on this later on, so keep reading:)

In the early days 5.1 surround sound was limited mainly to movie theatres and surround sound home entertainment systems. Things have evolved to unimaginable heights since the first 5.1 system hit the market, and today we even talk about 7.1 systems. Essentially a 5.1 speaker system consists of 6 channels; namely front left, front right, rear left, rear right, sub and the center channel. The center channel has a far less response frequency than all other channels of the system and it’s mainly used for dialogues (if it’s a DVD movie) or to enhance the overall performance.

As we mentioned above, the J9940 does not include any kind of 5.1 sound decoding capabilities. To make things more interesting for us to test, we decided to use Jazz speaker’s DE005 Dolby digital decoder in the setup as well.

The System

When the FedEx guy knocked on my door holding three packages which he couldn’t carry on his own, my jaw just dropped on the floor. I’m not joking folks, this system the HUGE!!!, and heavy. The front speakers are around 4 feet high, so the packaging looked more like a bazooka, except this was wider:) There were a total of 3 large packages, one containing the front speakers, another containing the sub, control unit, rear speakers and the final package containing iron stands for the rear speakers. By the time you unpack all of this, you’ll hardly have any room to move around, so make sure you do it methodically, because that’s something I have trouble living by. One thing worth mentioning here is that, Jazz speakers include over 10 meters of various cables to get you started. So far I have never come across any manufacture that provides this many cables with their systems and best of all these cables are of very high quality as well. (I remembered to get a picture of the cables only after I installed the whole system, so I wasn’t prepared to remove everything again!!!, but here’s a link from hardware-test which shows these cables

Before going onto the installation details, here’s a look at the specifications of the system. Be prepared to be STUNNED;
Specifications

It’s no printing mistake, the total J9940 speaker system is rated at 200RMS and the subwoofer alone is rated at 100RMS. This is serious power people; you can even afford to distribute some to your neighbors. :). When we received this unit from Jazz speakers a few weeks back, me and my colleagues spent a good hour or so simply admiring the design of the speakers, it’s just exquisite.

Alright time to move onto the installation.