SIMON JONES: Hi. My name is Simon Jones. I'm the director of portable PA marketing for JBL professional. We're here today at the AES 2008 introducing the new generation of EON products. The new generation, I got to tell you a little bit about the previous generations.

In 1995, we launched the EON product. It was revolutionary. It was innovative, and it defined a new product category: the molded or composite enclosure, integrated powered loudspeaker system, and we've been doing that for 14 years and have had an incredible amount of success with that. There was a revision about eight years ago when we upped the power level and we added some features on the input section, and we called it EON G2. But AES, we're launching the next generation of EON, the EON500 Series and the EON300 Series, redefining the category of molded composite powered loudspeaker systems with lighter weight, more performance, and more power.

And I got one down here. I've got the EON515 right here, which is the flagship product. It's a 450-watt powered loudspeaker system that weighs only 33 pounds. Thirty-three pounds. Now, the thing about EON, what it did is it defined this category of speakers, powered speaker systems that basically were the speaker system for everybody. If you wanted a speaker system, you wanted sound, you want it to be able to move it around, put it on a stick, put an XLR signal line into it, you can create instant sound and you can broadcast your message whether you're a DJ, whether you're a band, whether you're a school teacher or you’re a politician on hostings.

So, what we've done is we've redefined that. We've got more power, lighter weight, easy to move around. Everything about the product, the transducer components or the differential drive transducers by JBL is the core, is the heart of the JBL technology. It's the components, developed the differential drive that the original EON launched, and it went all the way up to VERTEC Technology [SOUNDS LIKE] out to a sound and all the way back down again to EON. Our 400-watt woofer weighs only 4-1/2 pounds, and as far as the power driving that, we have Crown develop the amplifier for that. All latest technology, class D amplification topology, switch-mode power supplies, reducing the weight without sacrificing the headroom and the power of the system.

You can see here on the input side, as far as increasing the performance and increasing the utility, we've got a three-channel mixer, we got two balanced line-level inputs, and a switchable mic-line input here with XLR and 1/4" input and then an XLR output. We have a very simple but pre-engineered EQ selection here. We got a boost selection here for playback, maybe low level, add a little bit of warmth to the bottom there and sparkle to the high frequency, flat or cut if using with a subwoofer and the monitor position if you want to take the lows away. And then we have this little feature here, the mix loop feature, which means that either in the loop function, anything that comes in the input gets looped directly to the output for daisy chain applications. Or, in a mix application, your whole mix comes through the output here. So, if you're using this as a personal keyboard monitor or something like that, you can create your mix and you can send your whole sub-mix out to the front of house or maybe another EON and then maybe put some more inputs in there. It adds versatility and flexibility to this speaker.

Remember, it's a utility speaker. It will do anything for anybody. Now, let's talk about the design. If we got to move these things around, we got to be comfortable, and part of the design here we took all of the hard edges off. Not only does that make it very durable but also very comfortable to move around. There are no corners to bash into your knees and your legs and things or slide in and out of your car. The grille adds an extra degree of utility and durability. It's a full grille in this category. You don't really see that very often, keeping all the crud out of the high-frequency horn, and also having a screen, an acoustically transparent screen backing here in the monitor position that will stop stuff, liquids, and other things like that sort of impressing into the components there, which is a pretty good thing.

And then for a portable PA speaker, you need handles. I mean look at this. How many speakers in this category have a full bar handle on the top? So that's 33 pounds, very lightweight, and it's the combination of handles. As far as pole mounting, without bending down, you can simply pick the speaker up and pole mount it. So 450 watts, I'm not particularly strong but there you go.