REPAIR SHOP 

Repair of  2 JBL EON POWER 15-  powered speakers

Fault the same on both speakers - volume control crackling, sound dropping  in and out

On inspection found the volume control potentiometers on both the input boards were damaged, after some phoning around discovered that JBL no longer have their own dedicated service department in the UK, it has now been farmed out to a company called Sound technology, got through to their  service department explained that I required 2 x potentiometers for the EON input board, the chap I spoke to quite frankly had no clue as to what I was talking about and I mean no idea what so ever -  well done JBL you have managed to destroy a perfectly good after sales system and replace it with shower of shit Ltd.

So I was left with the fact that getting hold of  replacement potentiometers from JBL was not going to happen, the only option seemed to be -  2 new input boards, however these speakers are quite old and  the cost of getting new boards was expensive, a look at the original item reveals a 6 pin mini dual pot, Checking the resistance, 1 half was 6.5k and the other 5.4k, however these readings were probably not accurate as they were shot to pieces, now it has been said an engineer can do for five pounds what any damn fool can do for fifty, the solution was to fit standard 10k dual potentiometers in their place, with a bit of hard wiring and opening the mounting hole up to 10mm the job looked ok and worked fine, (note is is necessary to put a mica insulating washer underneath the potentiometer to avoid contact with the PCB tracks)  repeated the procedure for the other speaker also replaced one of the tweeters with a Celestion unit.

As can be seen below the JBL EON is basically a cast aluminium baffle board with ports incorporating a speaker chassis all rolled into one, this curious design means any problems with the speaker requires a nightmare re-cone kit, also note the size of the magnet - or lack of size.- (update I have recently learned this is neodymium magnet hence the lack of size) The casting is a work of art but the speaker is rubbish, the amplifier is rubbish -  as you can tell I am not a big fan of these speakers, The RCF Powered speakers are far better.

Things to check for when opening one of these up are :

Undo all the screws at the back - even the ones holding the handle on

Make sure the Toriodal transformer is not loose - but do not over tighten, also make sure the blue and grey leads are not pulled tight and straining the PCB 

Check the tweeter is screwed in properly- a very small amount of loctite can be used  

Finally the speakers back together and a close up of the volume control

As can be seen the end result looks and works fine 

We hope the above information has been of assistance to those attempting a repair, we add more examples all the time, a lot of work goes into this section of our site from the doing the repairs, photos and answering technical support emails, to keep this a free service we rely on the goodwill of people who benefit and learn from the information supplied.

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