The recent news that Harman International’s $350 million acquisition of Sound United and all the brands associated with it has been signed, sealed and delivered is one of the biggest pieces of hi-fi news to break in recent memory.
In case you missed it, Bowers & Wilkins, Denon and Marantz are all now under the same ownership as AKG, Arcam, Harman Kardon, JBL, Mark Levinson and Revel.
This makes Harman quite the audio behemoth, with an even longer list of major brands under its belt, all with serious pedigree and impressive global reach.
We sat down with Dave Rogers, President, Lifestyle Division, Harman, to give us a bit of background on the deal, explain how Sound United and all its brands fit into the Harman family, and how things might take shape moving forward.
Rogers reveals that when Sound United was originally bought by Masimo back in February 2022 for $1.025 billion, Harman was also in the mix as a potential purchaser.
“When Masimo bought them, we were in the discussion at that point. We were one of the companies – there were some other parties involved – and then Masimo stepped in while we were talking to them, made the offer that they made, and we stepped away at that point.”
According to Rogers, many of the people involved in the 2022 discussions were involved this time around, too. “We’ve had interest in Sound United for a long time, and many of the leadership team were involved in those (2022) discussions. Those same people were in the meetings this time.
“At the end of last year, there was some press that was starting to show up before CES. And when we went to CES 2025, we arranged a first discussion to connect again – and it just evolved from there.”
Rogers mentions it’s only natural that Harman would be interested.
“99 per cent of the products we build are audio related, and they (Sound United) are pre-eminent brains in the space, in categories where we don't have a super strong presence.”
Rogers clarifies, “The AVR space, I mean. Arcam’s a great brand; we do nice business, but it's in a very small sliver of the market geographically, and we plan to keep it in that space, in that niche space.
“Maybe there's some learning on feature set or manufacturing capability in the plant in Japan, that Denon and Marantz have – maybe they could do some manufacturing there.”
It’s in manufacturing and engineering where Rogers feels big things could potentially happen.
“Leveraging the manufacturing capability of Sound United in the Worthing plant and in Shirakawa, could there be benefits? That would be the first place we'll look – but no decisions have been made.
“We'd look to leverage those facilities and then create a dialogue between engineers to share best-in-class, knowledge, information, testing that they’re doing and so on. Certainly, facilities are open to share; there are no hard lines between them.”
Denon has consistently made some of the best AV receivers we have tested in recent years, while the Marantz Cinema 30 is the AV receiver we use in the reference home cinema system in our dedicated London test room.
Rogers continues, “Equally, with the Bowers brand, we hope to leverage the UK plant for some Harman speaker manufacturing, assuming they have the capacity.
“There are some great engineers in Japan designing products. We'd like to get the team in England over there, or the team in Japan over to England, to share ideas on Arcam with the Japanese colleagues.
“We'd like to have some of the (Harman) loudspeaker engineers collaborate with the Bowers engineers looking for improvement.”
With that many brands under one roof, could there be any big clashes?
“Lower down into JBL, there's not a lot of crossover. There's not a lot of crossover in the headphone space. Bowers sits more premium, above everything that we're doing with the JBL brand; even Denon does to a certain degree.”
Part of the appeal for Harman appears to be in brands that have different appeal in different markets, due to the different sounds those territories favour. Rogers points to Bowers & Wilkins speakers as an example.
“You’ve got a UK/Europe-based loudspeaker, which has a different sonic signature from a US-based, dome and cone speaker, such as a Revel or a Polk, or a horn or waveguide speaker such as a JBL. There's a different sonic character. So we believe there's a market for all those brands to coexist. Maintaining that core identity of each brand is, I think, imperative.”
“We are very committed to having unique brand identities and heritages – we don’t want to disturb it, we're not looking to homogenise. We think each brand has a special place, especially in the high-end market.”
Does Rogers foresee much change? Initially, no. He sees the relationship following a similar path to that Harman took following its purchase by Samsung. That means Sound United is, and will continue to be, run as separate businesses.
“Sound United will come into the lifestyle division (of Harman), independently managed with its own sales force, with its own supply chain, with its own customer service. So we're pulling it in, but they're going to run the business within the consumer space.
“They have built a nice business, and we want to amplify that and put 100 per cent focus on audio, to identify features and use cases of consumers, and try to anticipate those use cases based on how people consume content.”
Personally, I think this is a great move for both parties. Harman has the know-how, ably backed by Samsung, while Sound United has three of the biggest brands in the audio business that need this stability following a tumultuous few years with Masimo.
And, let’s be honest, Harman has secured itself a bit of a bargain which would have been too good to ignore. Now it has a wealth of engineering and manufacturing experience to add to its knowledge base, not to mention a brand new sales and dealer network.
As long as it retains what makes each of Sound United’s (and its own) brands special and unique, it could have amazing potential. I think all of our fingers are well and truly crossed that Harman makes it a success.
Rogers gives a small hint of what might be to come. “Six months to a year, could we seize the luxury business, migrate out of the consumer audio and into Sound United because of the adjacencies? Perhaps. That's something we'll look at.”
We could definitely see this happening, especially if Sound United’s resources and network of dealers are already set up to make the most of Harman’s luxury offering from the likes of Arcam and Mark Levinson. We’ll be keeping a keen eye on developments over the coming months to see how it all shakes out.
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