Harman Launches Premium Headphone Line Under JBL Brand

JBL has become the latest audio brand hoping to wrestle share of premium-priced headphones from upstart Beats Electronics, which stormed on the scene five years ago with its Beats by Dr. Dre line that now has an enviable share of the market. JBL joined Sony and Bowers & Wilkins this month as longtime audio companies hoping to reclaim what they see as their rightful share of the premium audio market they helped create.

At parent company Harman’s coming-out party for its premium JBL Synchros series of in-ear and over-the-ear headphones at the Ace Hotel in New York last week, Sean Olive, director of acoustic research, pegged Beats’ share of the $300-and-over headphone market at more than 60 percent on revenue of $1 billion. Olive cited a recent Slate article that said Dr. Dre “isn’t selling great sound,” but is instead “selling the concept of ‘bass.'” One of the problems in the headphone market today is that consumers don’t have a chance to compare headphones, Olive said. “You can’t do an A-B comparison on Amazon, and you're lucky to find a store that can do a decent demonstration,” he said.

Despite the explosion in headphone sales that began with the iPod and has transitioned to smartphones, the science of headphone design “hasn’t caught up,” Olive told the audience that included members of the audio press and the Audio Engineering Society. Acoustic engineers are “just beginning to understand the relationship between how they should sound and how to measure them,” he said. There’s little published research on headphone listening experiments and there are no “perceptually meaningful” standards for measuring headphones, compared with widely accepted industry specifications for loudspeakers. There’s “no consensus” among headphone makers regarding how they should sound or be measured, Olive said. Unlike with speakers, where audio professionals generally agree on what makes a good speaker, “there seems to be no agreement” with headphones, Olive said.

Harman acoustical engineers decided to change that, working at the company’s Northridge, Calif., speaker testing lab over the past year to develop scientific methods for measuring headphone sound quality. Part of the process included developing acoustical measurements the company could use to interpret and predict how headphones would sound. Olive’s group published five papers on its headphone efforts with the Audio Engineering Society and has filed several patents on technologies it believes will help improve the sound quality, and measurements of sound quality, for headphones, he said.

In Northridge, engineers did blind listening tests with six popular headphones with Harman’s trained listeners and found general agreement that listeners preferred more “neutral” and “balanced” sound. Engineers then equalized headphones to target frequency responses to get a direct measurement of what listeners preferred. They used available test methods based on 20-year-old research for how headphones should be calibrated in diffuse-field and free-field conditions, which “raised a red flag” because they didn’t take into account room characteristics, Olive said. “If you listen to headphones calibrated to these standards, they'll sound too thin, too bright,” he said. Harman created its own measurements to create a “Harman target response” for headphones. After validating two Harman target responses with listeners, engineers found they were “strongly preferred” over diffuse and free-field calibrations and unequalized headphones, he said. Listener responses indicated the Harman response produced a natural bass that “wasn’t too boomy or muddy,” he said.

Harman used the New York event to launch the flagship JBL Synchros S700 powered headphones ($349). The S700s use JBL’s LiveStage signal processing technology, along with 50mm drivers. An on/off button engages the LiveStage feature, which Olive told us provides equalization and digital signal processing that applies HRTF (head-related transfer function) filters and room reflections. The headphone EQ is based on Harman’s reference listening room in Northridge, Olive said, and the spatial processing is based on a “neutral” listening room. “We tried to not add a lot of reflections or room sound on top of it,” he said. The rechargeable lithium-ion battery powers LiveStage for up to 28 hours, according to specs.

The S700s will be sold at Amazon and Crutchfield initially and the company is also looking for broader distribution through national and regional chains with brick-and-mortar stores, Chris Dragon, Harman’s senior director-brand marketing, told us. “We will be picky,” he said. The ability to demonstrate is important for selling the product, he said. “We don’t want to be just another headphone hanging on a peg.”