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This review first appeared in Inner World Audio where it can be read in its original Finnish version. The writer translated it personally and we feature it here for the benefit of our English-speaking audience. Kari Nevalainen also contributes to 6moons directly and it gives us great pleasure to return the favor and offer samples of his Finnish work to a broader readership - Ed.

Reviewer: Kari Nevalainen
Financial Interests: click here
Review Component Retail: €7.198/pr in Finland

Time passes. Three years have lapsed since my review of Jamo's Reference 909 speaker. Back then it was in the air already that there would be a scaled-down version, a speaker with similar sonics—especially in the bass region—of the full dipole radiation pattern but making less of a scene in the living room. Some prototypes showed up at various international hifii events but it was not until the spring of 2009 that the world saw a fully mature Jamo R907 ready for a critical eye and ear to be scrutinized and reviewed.  


This is not such a review, however. I recently did audition the R907 as I would have any other speaker to explore suitability for a full review. But then I wasn’t in the mood for penning a comprehensive writeup. While drafting the earlier R909 report, I had more or less exhausted what I have to say about this type of design. This time I thought it more appropriate to just focus on what I heard and retrospectively comment—if possible—on the differences between R907 and R909. 

One thing first. In one crucial respect Jamo has plainly failed. If the R907 was meant to, in any reasonable sense, be less visible and more inconspicuous than the R909, it's not. Despite featuring two 12" woofers instead of dual 15 inchers, the R907 is less than a match stick thinner. It is 8cm shorter but even that difference is hard to tell without immediate  reference. More importantly, the R907 is equally valiant, gallant and imposing. In the 2006 review, I compared the R909 to one of the rocks from the Stonehenge ruins; to a Bronze Age statue from the Cyclades; and to a piece of African art. All that applies to the R907. In short, the R907 is as bold and stately and will certainly make a similar statement wherever planted.

Alas, a pair of Jamo R907s is almost €3000 cheaper (€7198 vs €9998). That’s the kind of difference anybody can count in bread and butter. With this 40% savings, if the sonic setback wasn't unfairly excessive, it would be more than tolerable and one more reason to focus on the R907’s sound. 


Apart from woofer size and their cone material, the R907 looks very similar. A shoo-in but not identical Seas 5.5" magnesium cone covers the midrange above 250Hz and instead of the renowned ScanSpeak Revelator, a DTT 1” textile dome crosses in at 2500Hz and 12dB per octave. The thick multi-layered baffle and heavy cast-iron base look borrowed from the R909. But that’s all tech. This time I was keener on how the R907 sounds and in what ways it would (or not) prevent music from connecting with its symbolic meaning - whatever that symbolism might be based on.

I decided to test this music-making ability with specific samples from the Nouvelle Revue Du Son and Opus 3 test CDs. The purpose of these is to function as a more or less accurate indicator of certain sonic aspects. Rather than stopping there, I would then assess what the sound did to the music as we do it at the Inner World Audio magazine. Obviously, results cannot solely be attributed to the speaker. Sony and Accuphase electronics and the ca. 4 x 6m room definitely had their fingers in that pie, too.