Whether or not it’s foolish to compare them to the originals depends on JBL’s intent in bringing the speaker back. It’s obvious their visual appeal is nostalgic, but not having heard them, I can’t comment on their sound. If their intent was to achieve the same type of sound as the old speakers, but with newer, presumably better components, then I’m not sure I’d ever be convinced to audition them. I always found the originals to be too, well, everything - boom, sizzle and forward midrange. Like someone had an equalizer in the system and pushed all the sliders up. Given their ancestors were primarily used as studio monitors, that kind of response can be useful for analytical listening, for hearing details in a recording that might get lost otherwise. But that’s not the kind of speaker I like for listening to music at home, where it can be far too fatiguing. On the other hand, if this is an attempt at a more balanced and natural sounding speaker in the old cabinet for fun’s sake, well that might make them interesting to try. But since that price is way out of my budget in the first place, I’ll stick with what I have. The price when I first saw it actually reminded me of an old Corvette road test in Car & Driver, decades back, when Chevy first increased the car’s price into entry-level supercar territory. The test said they’d changed the price from something that could be afforded by the average blue-collar shift supervisor to something that could only be afforded by people who import their drinking water.