JMR Electroacoustique BLISS Jubilé

The late Jean-Marie Reynaud was one of those loudspeaker designers who never learned the art of making a bad loudspeaker! Every design upon which he put his imprimatur sounded lively and lovely, and it’s good to see (hear?) that in passing the baton from father to son, Jean-Claude Reynaud is assiduously following his father’s lead. The JMR Electroacoustique BLISS Jubilé stand-mount loudspeaker is just as lively and lovely as its predecessors.

In fact, on my first listen to the BLISS Jubilé, my first thought was, “Why isn’t JMR better known in the UK and the US?” It ticks all the right boxes and has a sound that satisfies the requirements for ‘tuneful’ bass in the UK and ‘deep’ bass in the US. All the while having that distinctive mid-range-driven speed and fun factor that is very much a function of French loudspeaker design. When discussing them with an industry friend, the reaction was ‘…nice!’ And yet, the brand – unfairly – can struggle for recognition in the public domain.

The JMR Electroacoustic BLISS Jubilé should go some way to redress that imbalance in the loudspeaker Force. That is, so long as the lack of recognition is ‘fear of the acute accent’, in which case… this is the BLISS Jubilee! Whichever way you celebrate it, the BLISS Jubilé is a two-way stand-mount design featuring EUTERPE drivers, a 28mm impregnated silk-dome tweeter with a 170mm long-throw mid-bass unit with a long-fibre paper cone.

Franglais

The website and manual have a charming ‘Franglais’ feel, which can seem ‘quirky.’ For example, the loading of the cabinet is described as “based on the loading principle developed for the Supreme Offering, a device using four coupled cavities with progressive damping leading to a front laminar vent. This proprietary charging principle significantly improves the system’s group propagation time.” Another way of saying this is ‘transmission line,’ but while I like the brevity of the latter, it lacks the near poetry of the former. Calling the bass driver ‘the boomer’ is equally poetic and no more or less right than calling it ‘the woofer.’ Regardless, the enclosure is a transmission line with a front laminar exit, and the front baffle has rounded edges to reduce step effects.

  However, going back to the boomer for a moment, the BLISS Jubilé’s mid/bass unit benefits from an internal rod bracing and tensioning system, which locks the magnet and basket in place, improving the impulse response of the driver and helps to stiffen the cabinet in the process. This is a development that JMR first used in previous models, but it clearly works well. Other brands have tried similar systems or mounted the driver to a rear baffle plate to reduce driver coloration and improve impulse response. Unfortunately, most of these experiments are short-lived and cut due to costs. JMR is one of the rare brands that continued to pursue this means of improving driver performance and should be applauded for its consistency and resolve.

Crossover simplicity

Moving across to the crossover network, JMR went for a comparatively straightforward 12dB/octave filter with a crossover point of 2.8kHz. This features non-inductive air-coil resistors, silver armature capacitors, JMR’s own HP1132 silver-copper internal wiring, and the whole network is hand soldered in free space, and the circuit-board-free crossover network is then mounted on anti-resonant supports. JMR strongly recommend its Magic Stand II, which is said to extend bandwidth and imaging properties, but was unavailable at the time of the review.

The BLISS Jubilé operates best about 2.5m apart, with a slight toe-in (or “pinch them very slightly” in JMR-speak) and should be 40cm from the rear and side walls. With an 88dB sensitivity and a four-ohm minimum impedance, the JMR Bliss Jubilé is relatively easy to drive and shouldn’t trouble any amplifier. I used it with my go-to Primare I35 Prisma, which is indicative of amplifiers likely to partner the JMR stand-mount, and the two worked extremely well together.

Could it be magic?

I’m surprised JMR makes such a big thing about its Magic Stand II because, on a pair of regular 24” sand-filled loudspeaker stands, the BLISS Jubilé turned in an extremely good performance. If I’m running these sub-par because of the wrong stand, it wasn’t something that interfered with the performance of the loudspeaker one jot. But, if it is the ace up the JMR’s sleeve, then the BLISS Jubilé moves from great to awesome!

But perhaps I can talk JMR around to sending me a pair of stands. They include a pair of Helmholtz resonators in their construction, so JMR’s recommendation isn’t to ‘upsell’ a pair of stands. That will mean I have to hold on to these little beauties for a while longer! Therefore, I will keep some of my powder dry for the revisit when these loudspeakers and their stands finally meet.

No dry powder

Who am I kidding? I can’t keep any of my powder dry on this loudspeaker; it’s excellent. It has a fine balance of energy and fun that makes it impossible to ignore. I’ve long argued that a loudspeaker must start with the midrange; get that right and the rest will (should?) follow. And it’s in the midrange that the JMR BLISS Jubilé excels. Music is refined, liquid, and extremely articulate in that all important frequency range. It’s fast and dynamic, too. Vocalists project into the room with the sort of fast-transient details that are normally the domain of electrostatic designs but with the visceral impact of dynamic drivers.

This midrange is also extremely lively and exciting. I can imagine that in extreme cases, that will push an uneven-sounding system into brightness, but the rest of the listening world will love the energy it brings to music.

As always, my go-to recording for vocal articulation is Joyce DiDonato [Stella di Napoli, Erato]. It’s also a good test of dynamics thanks to her possession of a damn fine set of lungs. Her diction and vocal projection were perfectly played through the JMR loudspeaker, while the parts where she unleashed her dynamic vocal cords on unsuspecting listeners could still be shocking.

Friendly rivalry

The friendly rivalry between our two great nations is well documented, so it’s altogether right and proper that I should devote at least part of the review to playing a lot of English music. And I did; playing everything from Zedoc the Priest (yes, OK, Handel was German, but you get the drift), Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’ [The Seldom Seen Kid, Fiction] some quality jangly guitar and whining about jobs and ambivalent sexuality from The Smiths [‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’, from The Queen Is Dead, Rough Trade] and to bang things home, ‘Spitfire’ from Public Service Broadcasting’s Inform – Educate – Entertain album [Test Card Recordings]. I guess I could have found Laurence Oliver reciting the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech from his 1944 interpretation of Henry V, but that might be over-egging things. Regardless, the loudspeaker delivered all these tracks perfectly without the hint of accent. Or a shrug.

Moving out past the midrange, you get extremely good frequency extension. The transmission line gives a powerful, but coherent bass, without any of the ‘boat anchor’ effect that plagued older versions of this enclosure. It’s perhaps not quite as rhythm-sensitive as the likes of PMC, but neither does this have the ‘half a beat behind the beat’ ponderous bass that some still – erroneously – attribute to transmission lines.

Informative

And if the bass is good, then the treble is excellent. It’s informative, fast and detailed yet without the sting and up-tilt often accompanying these traits. Yet, it doesn’t suffer the characteristic soft-dome warmth or roll-off that many loudspeakers pass off as a laid-back sound. This is a treble as exciting as it is accurate.

Staging properties are excellent too. You get a sense of a band playing in your room, which scales up and down well. Yes, the limits come through when playing something with some pomp; syrupy, complex prog, orchestral swells, the bit where the fat lady sings at the climax of an opera. At that point, the BLISS Jubilé gently reminds you that it is a two-way stand-mount and the laws of physics need to be obeyed. Harking back to the Magic Stand II, I wonder if this might be one of the parts where it benefits.

No expression

None of which can express quite what the JMR BLISS Jubilé does so well. It conveys the magic of the performance extremely well. That – beyond anything – is the BLISS Jubilé signature trait. You play someone singing or playing with some real mojo; I’m drawn to jazz here because the first time this happened was when playing Chet Baker singing ‘My Funny Valentine.’ But the JMR BLISS Jubilé has that ability to catch you unawares.

The song’s emotion – something I’ve heard a thousand times – is pushed to the max, the hairs on the back of your neck jump up and you are briefly choked up by the passion in his voice and his – frankly beautiful – trumpet playing. It’s hard to express quite how hypnotic these moments are, and the JMR BLISS Jubilé is one of the only speakers that can do this regularly that doesn’t cost a small fortune to own and a larger fortune to drive.

For those (not) about to rock

I feel it is against my better principles (loudspeakers don’t have a built-in musical filter), but the nature and output of the BLISS Jubilé don’t lend it to the more headbanging end of the community. I’m not saying the loudspeaker can’t ‘rock’ (it can, and does), just that it can’t do it at shouty levels. This is probably most noticeable in rock music because it’s frequently a compressed PA-like sound played loud, and the exuberance and energy of the BLISS Jubilé can make that too much of a good thing. The same holds to a lesser extent if you like to play Beethoven’s Ninth or Mahler’s Eighth at ‘fruity’ levels. It’s effectively making a loudspeaker that combines fun and refinement in most settings jump out of its comfort zone.

I don’t want to overstate this, though. In context, you would need to be driving the BLISS Jubilé very hard indeed, and even trying to overdrive it in a room that is too large. The 99% rule applies here; 99% of people, 99% of the time will listen to the BLISS Jubilé and never experience this limitation, even if their musical tastes run from AC/DC to ZZ Top. However, if you want a loudspeaker that can double up as a PA system, you might best look elsewhere.

Nominative determinism

There used to be a dentist in Barnet, in North London who went by the name of Ian Screech. There was a medal-winner cross-country runner at the 2009 London Youth Games called Aaron Farr. One of the longest-serving editors of the neurological journal Brain was Walter Russell Brain. It’s called ‘nominative determinism’ and highlights how someone, or something can be extremely well named for the job. The JMR Electroacoustique BLISS Jubilé is one such product. It’s BLISS by name, BLISS by nature.

They have a midrange that cuts through the ephemera of audio and gets right under your skin, and that is backed up by a sublime treble and a surprisingly deep bass. It might not be the last word in playing loud, but when something sounds this sublime, you can often set most other considerations aside. The sheer excitement of listening to music this live and impassioned makes for some fun listening sessions.

And that is before we get to the recommended Magic Stand II. Even without those stands, these are loudspeakers with something close to magic powers. They draw you into the music in a way that few loudspeakers at anything close to this price could ever expect to do. It’s a truly BLISSed out experience.

Technical specifications

• Type Two-way transmission line stand-mount loudspeaker
• Drive units 28mm impregnated silk-dome tweeter; 170mm long-throw midbass unit
• Crossover slope 12dB/octave
• Frequency Response 45Hz–25kHz
• Impedance 4Ω (minimum)
• Sensitivity 88dB/W/m (2.83V)
• Distortion Less than 0.4% (84dB)
• Finish White pearl, black gloss, anthracite, dark cherry
• Dimensions (H×W×D) 41.6 × 29 × 21cm
• Weight 11kg
• Price €2,130/$2,500 per pair

Manufacturer

JMR Electroacoustique

www.jm-reynaud.com

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