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A sign of the times.

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jbl_man View Drop Down
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    Posted: 14 August 2017 at 7:51pm
Be seeing you.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote djeddie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 August 2017 at 10:12pm
So, are you gonna change your username to 'harman_man' Ian???
Chas n Dave : it's like Drum and Bass but with beards.             E=mc² ±3dB
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hemisphere Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 August 2017 at 10:21pm
Quote As a result of deteriorating business conditions and personal issues, [James B. Lansing] committed suicide on September 4, 1949
And it's been downhill ever since! ;)

I consider myself somewhat technophobic (ironically given my interests) but I couldn't begin to count the amount of times I've seen people reference research papers by the JBL engineers mentioned.

The trouble is there's a pervasive sense that sound reproduction technology is basically done: 'A speaker is a speaker is a speaker'. 

[quote]There will be no more internal transducer development, no world class engineers, no more internal model making capabilities and no more real JBL product. It is just going to be me-too product copied from somebody else and designed and manufactured in China or equivalent.[/quite]This is a bit overly defeatist, imo.

If Harman Group wasn't so determinend to throw away JBL's reputation as a pro audio pioneer, there is masses they could do to turn things around with some dedicated engineers and a solid industrial vision. They would need more than your standard transducer designers though and would need to look to modern technology - robotics and automated production lines.

It's either that or concede defeat to the Chinese copies imo. It's an unfortunate state of affairs but it doesn't mean guaranteed failure.

If Elon Musk can produce lithium battery cells for 40% less than Chinese imports by leveraging his own huge internal demand for the components in electric cars and solar power battery storage systems to justify the production of a vast high speed automated production facility, a high grade transducer producing company like JBL with the reputation and expeertisse necessary to carry it off could take the market by storm if they wanted to. They would need to be willing to take significant development investment risks though, and would need to look past the potential job losses of manual workers on the factory floor.


Originally posted by Elon Musk Elon Musk wrote:

the exit rate of cells will be faster than bullets from a machine gun

If Lansing were born in these times, do you think he would look past the potential of automation technology using advanced robotics to produce precision transducers?

I've seen enough footage of speaker factories to get a solid enough feeling for the degree of precision involved in putting a driver together. Getting the whole process reliably automated from start to finish would require an immense amount of tooling and R&D, but it could absolutely be done. Some of the Italian manufacturers are already close and I'll bet they're aiming in that direction.

That, along with their remaining edge in engineering skills (which is always being eaten into), is the only thing that allows them to keep up with the Chinese copies on European overheads.

The paradox is that in order to keep quality products at a competitive price, a company needs to leverage massive volume of production to justify the greater tooling and engineering costs, but the pro audio components market just isn't that big.

Harman Group have their fingers in so many audio pies though, and the same factory/processes and toolset that work for a 21" driver could be used on a 2" one if they're designed properly. You could have one enormous factory like Tesla's Gigafactory, with the capacity to produce their entire production line to the level of quality you would expect from skilled handcraft.

The cost and expertise necessary to develop it would be phenomenal, but it can all be done with existing technology, and Harman has deep enough pockets for it. They're owned by Samsung now actually (as of 2016), so theoretically they have access to unlimited funding and expertise (for all practical purposes). 

Would that be a good thing though? Probably not, as it goes, but what are you going to do? That seems like the foreseeable future, as far as I can tell. Resources, vision, expertise, and enormous quantities of capital to drive it. 

But there's absolutely no suggestion it will necessarily be Harman International or Music Group or any of those massive companies. History suggests it actually probably won't be. I mean it might be. But it's very high risk and they would need to go all in. They'rre big lumbering behemoths and they have their routines fairly well established - the old adage about not fixing something if it ain't broken comes to mind. 

That's how the car industry worked for the last few decades with regards to electric cars and other non-petrol based solutions. Tesla Motors came more or less out of nowhere and now they're dominating the industry because they had the vision and expertise and were willing to go all in, they had absolutely no commitment to the old methods. 
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hemisphere Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 August 2017 at 10:23pm
Originally posted by djeddie djeddie wrote:

So, are you gonna change your username to 'harman_man' Ian???
I'm afraid that's going to have to be samsung_man now, sorry.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote mobiele eenheid Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 August 2017 at 10:49pm
Quote In February of 2010 JBL began shutting down its Northridge, California facilities and moving production to Mexico and China. Many of the craftsman that had built the drivers and cabinets for over a quarter of a century found themselves unemployed.

On September 30, 2015, Greg Timbers, the engineer responsible for many of JBL’s most popular loudspeakers over the past 40 years, was let go. He posted the following to the Lansing Heritage forums: “I was unceremoniously separated from employment by Harman following a 90 second explanation. My position was eliminated!”

Real gentlemen that current management, someone deserves a double bonus!

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Wikl109 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 12:01am
I'm pretty certain JBL announced they were moving all manufacturing away from the USA some time back.
It's a shame as now both JBL & Cerwin-Vega no longer build products in America & they were both the original American macho loudspeaker brands (In my eyes anyway!).
It was always articles from the JBL technical library that I used to spend my time at college reading in the 90's. (I should have been doing college work ).
This was always coming for JBL though when a giant like Harman is in charge.
Cheers, Chris.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hemisphere Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 1:11am
They're looking ahead at the market and watching what's happening in China. The engineering principles of design simply aren't developing faster than people can figure out what's what and make a passable alternative that will satisfy 90% of people well enough.

They've got to compete with the Alto's and the Behringer's and God knows who else besides on the horizon.

There's a major dominance battle going on in pro audio at the moment. Manufacturing costs and overheads are the deciding factor. Big companies have big overheads. Those two pioneering engineers who were fired? Overheads!

A JBL Eon 612 is 450 Euros. But you can get an Alto TS212 which frankly looks the absolute business (arguably more pro than the Eons, and performs near enough that most people wouldn't notice), for 329 Euros.

And that's just one competitor. There are loads and they're all increasingly ruthless. Founded on the principle of ruthless cost-cutting.

If you're a business founded on delivering the highest quality and durability with cost-cutting as an afterthought, and you find yourself competing with businesses founded on the reverse, they'll edge you out of the market unless you conform, because the industry is so wildly distributed and atomised, people care less and less about reputations and more about bang for buck, because that's what all the marketing bods (and casual users) have been parroting over and over and over for knows how long.

"How many dB? How many Watts? What can I get for 200 quid?" 

JBL was successful in a time when there was so much less information and knowledge floating around for people to wrap their heads around and base decisions on. More people relied on brand reputation to make a purchasing decision, so sound quality and durability had to be prioritised. That's what audio brand reputations are made of. People remember quality and they tell their friends. Same deal with event quality. Promoter reputation used to be founded more on word of mouth, now it's 'how many Facebook likes', or 'Instagram follows' (see the recent 'Instagram influencers' festival disaster on .. I don't even remember. Some stupid island. A garbage festival on an exotic island that closed on the first day, that people paid thousands to go to...because people with lots of followers on Instagram said it would be good.

Anyway now almost everyone works by dB and frequency response vs price, and the Internet/web-stores give you an instantaneous research tool to compare all manufacturers in one sitting.

So everything's reversed. Suddenly reputation, durability, and sound quality is a sideshow, and cold hard specifications are in the spotlight. Reputation only seems to matter the extent that you're confirmed to be reasonably honest about your published specifications. Sound quality is subjective as ever and if you spend 300 quid on a PA speaker it's very unlikely you're not going to be at least satisfied with it, unless you're a grizzled old cynic, but most people buying plastic boxes from major retailers and reviewing them online are not grizzled old cynics, so anything above 'pretty good' quickly gets a reputation for being 'AMAZING', and it's 50% cheaper. JBL? Who's JBL? What's a JBL?


Edited by Hemisphere - 15 August 2017 at 1:17am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote odc04r Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 8:53am
Pro Audio is a long way into the graph of effort vs diminishing returns now. Maybe 90% of performance available for a minimal amount of effort. To get the next 10% requires a disproportionate amount of effort. To fund the R&D required for that 10% in software, hardware, and precision manufacturing requires you to have a customer book of people willing to write big cheques for systems that are expected to last and be well supported. It's a hard market to play in. I don't know how much of the JBL professional line Harman intend to keep going, but they have indeed decided to aggressively cut overheads. How much of that cost cutting will be re-invested back into the company's R&D vs lining executives pockets when they meet their quarterly cost reduction target before leaving to repeat the dance somewhere else remains to be seen.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote jbl_man Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 9:11am
Originally posted by Hemisphere Hemisphere wrote:

Originally posted by djeddie djeddie wrote:

So, are you gonna change your username to 'harman_man' Ian???
I'm afraid that's going to have to be samsung_man now, sorry.


LOL

Or even Mr.Wang_man ,but i think people might get the wrong idea. (whatever you do,don't google that!)


Be seeing you.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote cooky1257 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 11:09am
As far as I'm aware JBL Pro is still doing R&D at Northridge and the night(s) of the long knives took place at JBL Consumer. The move of production to Mexico looked good on a spreadsheet but the amount of QC failures was eye watering.

 And before we all worship at the altar of Tesla ;http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/9085/why-is-teslas-quality-control-still-so-poor

There's shed loads more(not to mention the alleged health issues and dickensian working practices) but you get the idea.


Edited by cooky1257 - 15 August 2017 at 11:38am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hemisphere Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 12:36pm
I've read about the issues with Tesla (quality control and worker conditions) and to be honest it sounds like they're both being sorted. Considering the basis of my respect is that they managed to bring manufuacturing on-shore to the US, I really doubt they fare badly against the Chinese alternatives in those areas, and they seem to have a reasonable roadmap to smooth these things out.

Obviously all new companies have teething problems and the bigger the ambition the more room for problems. Same issue with the Mexico move - looks good on paper but doesn't necessarily work in practice, but even in that case in the long term those are obviously things which can be ironed out through trial and error.

Behringer's QC used to be appalling but now it's alright. According to their Wiki page: "The plant turns out over 50,000 mixers per month with a failure rate that is less than 0.1%", which I assume means less than 0.1% of them get sent back to them within warranty and found to not have failed due to misuse. That's also in China btw which proves the QC issue isn't unsurmountable. No idea what working conditions are like at Behringer though.

I just like that lithium cell example in particular as it illustrates what can be achieved in theory. When people say "you can't competitively manufacture domestically anymore" it's just not true, it's just a much bigger challenge. Even small businesses can do it - Minirigs are a great example, and there are many parallels between them and Tesla - they both design, engineer and manufacture their products in-house, down to the smallest details (well, I don't think they make their own drivers and  all the small details, but some of them for sure), which cuts costs considerably, and they both sell direct to the consumer cutting out middlemen.

Neither products are cheap, and there's a prestige element attached to both, connected with their business ethos and well earned reputations for expertise in their respective fields, which helps people justify paying a bit extra. 

Theoretically both could subscribe to the ruthless offshore cost-cutting techniques and deliver their products for a substantially lower price, with mostly comparable quality, but since they don't face substantial like-for-like competition, they don't have to. And in Tesla's case at least, they seem to be strategising smartly enough to meet that challenge when it turns up. 

I don't cheerlead for either of these companies unconditionally, but I thought about the Minirig quite a lot and can't see any obvious way that the format could be substantially improved upon without adding costs and detracting from the minimalist appeal. I find it constantly surprising that still no one copied the format given how many designs are on the market now, which suggests there's a lot more to the build and design process than is immediately apparent, or that people who clone Bluetooth speaker designs don't have an imaginative process that extends beyond injection moulded shell + stamped/bent perforated grille + rubber trim in a million different permutations...

..and their ethos probably says there's no possible justifcation for a quality 3" + 15w amp + large battery when you could have 2x half-decent 2" + passive radiator + 2x3w amp + small battery for less than half or even 1/3 of the price all in, and it'll produce a comparable result.

I don't know enough about electric cars to say either way but I like some of what I'm seeing from Tesla. If not for their actual products then for the inspiration it no doubt offers to people. If people are inspired and then later become disillusioned when all the smoke and mirrors fall away then they at least have their earlier naive misconceptions to hold onto, and they might if we're lucky find a way of translating them into the next generation which does things properly.


Edited by Hemisphere - 15 August 2017 at 3:07pm
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote jbl_man Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15 August 2017 at 12:43pm
Originally posted by cooky1257 cooky1257 wrote:

As far as I'm aware JBL Pro is still doing R&D at Northridge and the night(s) of the long knives took place at JBL Consumer. The move of production to Mexico looked good on a spreadsheet but the amount of QC failures was eye watering.





From the article...

"So this brings an end to any world class engineers at JBL. Jerry and I were the last two. There are only 3 guys left, and although they are competent, they are no where near the knowledge, success or capability of what they just dumped. The senior Model maker left last week to go elsewhere, which means that Consumer no longer has any model making capabilities, either.

It appears that this is the end for JBL as we have known it. The Lab equipment is in total disarray with much of it not working properly. If it weren’t for [JBL] Professional’s need for, and use of the lab, I doubt that it would function at all. There will be no more internal transducer development, no world class engineers, no more internal model making capabilities and no more real JBL product. It is just going to be me-too product copied from somebody else and designed and manufactured in China or equivalent. "

Be seeing you.
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