1911Colt wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2024 7:52 am
How is JBL these days? Is the quality still there? I have a soft spot for them since I still have my L100s I bought new in 90 or 91 driven by the same old Carver I bought at the same time.
The short answer is 'ok'. Fortunately, they survived the attempt to move almost everything overseas - and still have amazing engineers, facilities, and the necessary resources to design the best stuff.
The long answer is that they aren't exactly what they used to be. A familiar story for sure... in 2007 Harman was bought by private equity group KKR. They bought a CEO who had no experience in consumer & pro audio, might as well have been heading up a company selling toilet paper beforehand. There was no respect for the legacy or the amazing top-end loss-leader products that kept the prestige intact. They tried to move the whole engineering department to China. They started bringing in engineers from China for a few months for us to train - but that's not what they told us - they thought we were stupid. We didn't exactly help them. They kept telling us there wouldn't be layoffs. The morale was extremely poor. We went from designing products on-hand in Northridge CA to writing 200-page product specifications for the team in China to execute. With no advance notice whatsoever (but we knew) they had a round or two of layoffs and treated career employees like criminals. Shortly thereafter the whole plan backfired spectacularly. They couldn't execute anything properly at the facilities in China. In general, the folks in China are amazing at copying stuff, but can't design a paper bag. They were trying to replace hundreds of years of expertise w/ just new engineers. Nothing was done correctly, we would get six, seven or more prototypes of things and it would be wrong, wrong, wrong. So frustrating. Furthermore, we started finding counterfeit parts in products. Dare I say it was funny to us as we knew what would happen. One vivid memory is in 2011 they made a run of 50,000 JBL EON PA speakers and there was a counterfeit amplifier IC. It cost a fortune in time and money. They bailed on their plan and kept Northridge and other US locations open. Many employees were laid off but some survived. After a few more years Harman was bought by Samsung in late 2016 and it was a best-case scenario at the time. Many facilities remain in the US as well as other countries and some of the talent remains. It's not what it used to be as technology has converged as it has in all markets.. companies copy stuff faster and things start to look the same. And materials are more expensive, so some parts are inferior to what we used to be able to use, and it forces new technologies like the many variants of digital amplification to reduce cost.
MarkyDents wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2024 10:36 am
I have JBL architectural speakers throughout my home being run by an OSD amp and I’m thoroughly impressed with their power handling and audio quality. Especially for their size.
yeah they definitely still have quality engineers. That stuff is still designed in the US. Every company has dud products but in general the stuff is very well designed as they still have the engineers and just as important the engineering facilities to design things properly. The hardest part was designing to a price point. JBL always had a high margin. A $1000 product was made for $100, whereas a competitor would have a $1000 that cost $200 to make. Usually they are function over form, generally the products would perform excellent but sometimes the industrial design would leave some to be desired. But they've got better in more recent years.
