JBL L42ms

The JBL L42ms is an all-in-one music system: a single wide cabinet holding the speakers, the amplification and the streaming, styled after JBL’s L-series hi-fi speakers of the 1970s with the walnut veneer and the foam grille.

It is the smaller of JBL’s two music systems, meant for a sideboard or a shelf where a pair of speakers and a separate amplifier would be too much.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker itself and its own app.

Before you buy

An all-in-one in a single cabinet cannot produce a wide stereo image the way two separated speakers can. That is the trade for the tidiness, and processing only partly compensates.

The retro styling is the reason most people buy it, and the cabinet is finished properly rather than printed.

The JBL L75ms is the larger version of the same idea.

Specifications