WhereIsAtlas · Audio

Who Actually Owns Your Speakers?

One Samsung subsidiary now owns sixteen of the best-known names in audio. Three Chinese companies are winning the categories the incumbents abandoned. And everyone is suing everyone.

Since September 2025, a single Samsung Electronics subsidiary — Harman International — has owned JBL, harman/kardon, AKG, Infinity, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, Revel and Arcam, plus Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Boston Acoustics, HEOS and Classé, acquired from Masimo for $350 million — brands Masimo had bought for $1.025 billion in 2022. Meanwhile Anker, Edifier and FiiO have taken ground in categories the incumbents left behind. And in consumer audio, patent litigation runs in both directions: Bose beat JBL and Infinity over an elliptical speaker port in 2001, and Harman sued Klipsch over a party speaker in 2024.

The list is the story

Here is what one company owns.

Under its own name, Harman International's audio brands include JBL, harman/kardon, AKG, Infinity, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, Revel and Arcam [1][2]. In September 2025 it added, from Masimo, the former Sound United portfolio: Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Boston Acoustics, HEOS and Classé [1][2].

That is sixteen brands that most listeners think of as competitors. It is one owner. And Harman is not an independent company — it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics since March 2017 [1][3].

Nor is it mostly an audio company any more, which is the context that makes owning sixteen audio brands a small part of the story. Pulse, the English-language service of Maeil Business News Korea, reported in April 2026 that Harman's 2025 revenue reached KRW 15.78 trillion — about US$10.67 billion — more than double its 2017 level, with operating profit up from KRW 57.4 billion in 2017 to KRW 1.53 trillion [12]. About 65 to 70 per cent of that came from automotive electronics, with car-audio and cockpit revenue estimated at KRW 10 trillion to 11 trillion, and Harman holding what the report describes as the global number one position in digital cockpits and car audio [12]. The report attributes those figures to Samsung Electronics. So the speaker brands that give this story its headline are, financially, the shop window of an automotive supplier.

Inside Harman the brands are not one undifferentiated pile either. They are assigned to divisions, and Harman names one of them itself. HARMAN Luxury Audio Group, headquartered at the company's acoustic engineering centre in Northridge, California, is described in Harman's own press material as bringing together five brands — JBL, JBL Synthesis, Mark Levinson, Revel and ARCAM — and as "a lifestyle business unit of HARMAN International, a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd." [10].

Harman's own technical-support centre draws the same division slightly differently: ARCAM, JBL Synthesis, JBL Summit, Lexicon, Mark Levinson and Revel, with a note that Lexicon's DD and MC Series processors are supported as consumer products while other Lexicon Pro gear routes to Harman Professional [11]. The two lists are not in conflict so much as answering different questions — which brands Harman sells as luxury, and which ones its luxury support desk answers for. It does mean "how many brands is that?" has no single number: five by Harman's marketing roster, six by its support roster, sixteen across the parent company.

The brands still standing outside that structure are a shorter list than people expect: Sony, Panasonic (which owns Technics), the privately held Bose, and Sonos. Those four are the significant independents left in a market that has otherwise been consolidated into a single Korean conglomerate.

How it got there

The consolidation did not begin with Samsung. It began with a loudspeaker.

In 1969 Harman bought JBL, the loudspeaker manufacturer [3]. That took a company founded in 1953 to build one product — an integrated hi-fi receiver — and turned it into an owner of brands aimed at different customers. Everything since has been the same move at larger scale: 1976 brought a sale to Beatrice Foods for $100 million and a partial break-up; 1980 a $55 million buyback; 1985 the repurchase of the receiver division that Beatrice had sold off; 1991 a restructuring of 21 divisions into five [3].

Then Samsung bought the whole thing in 2017 [1]. And in 2025 it added sixteen-brand scale by acquiring Sound United [1].

The strangest part: a medical company's detour

The Sound United brands did not arrive from another audio company. They arrived from a maker of hospital patient-monitoring equipment.

Masimo bought Sound United as part of an attempt to move into consumer products — an attempt that, as trade press reported when the sale was announced, centred on a health-focused smartwatch positioned against the Apple Watch, and that did not go as planned [2]. The board reviewed the consumer audio business and decided to sell; the company's chief executive described the divestiture as refocusing on unmet clinical need [2].

The sale price was $350 million in cash, agreed in May 2025 and completed in September [1][2].

What Masimo paid for those brands is the part that stayed unverified in the trade coverage, and it is now on the record. On 15 February 2022 Masimo entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger with Viper Holdings Corporation — the Sound United parent, with Viper Holdings, LLC named as seller representative — at a purchase price of $1.025 billion, subject to adjustment for net working capital, transaction expenses, cash and debt at closing, payable in cash, with $30 million of it deposited into escrow [9]. The agreement named Masimo's wholly owned acquisition vehicle Sonic Boom Acquisition Corp. as the merger subsidiary, and gave the deal a termination date of 14 August 2022 if it had not closed [9].

Read the two filings together and the shape of the transaction is a headline loss of roughly $675 million in three years, before those working-capital and debt adjustments and before whatever the audio business earned or lost in between. That is the number the phrase "refocusing on unmet clinical need" is doing the work of not saying.

Two details make this more than a trivia point.

The first is that Harman's own press release announcing the completion didn't claim the brands were complementary — it said the deal expanded Harman's footprint across home audio, headphones, hi-fi components and car audio, and that Sound United would run as a standalone unit inside Harman's Lifestyle division [1]. That is a structure designed to avoid the obvious problem.

The second is that trade press named the problem directly. Bowers & Wilkins and Denon were the motivation; Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Classé and Boston Acoustics were harder to place because they overlap with JBL, harman/kardon, Mark Levinson, Arcam and Revel [2]. When one company owns a dozen speaker brands, most of them are competing for the same shelf and the same customer.

Two lawsuits, and what they show

A concentration like this invites a story about a monopolist. The litigation record does not support it, in either direction.

Bose v. JBL, 274 F.3d 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2001). Bose sued JBL and Infinity Systems — both now Harman brands — over a loudspeaker port whose boundary was defined by an ellipse. The district court found no literal infringement but infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, awarded $5,676,718.32, and the Federal Circuit affirmed [5]. The plaintiff here was Bose, which is privately held and far smaller than Harman's owner. In that case the consolidating giant was the defendant.

Harman v. VOXX, No. 1:24-cv-01411 (D. Del.), filed 24 December 2024. Harman sued VOXX International and Klipsch Group asserting thirteen design patents, every one titled "Illuminated loudspeaker," against a single product: the Klipsch Gig XXL Party Speaker [4]. The case was stayed in December 2025 and dismissed with prejudice on 28 January 2026, with no settlement terms on the public docket [4]. Halfway through, VOXX was acquired by Gentex Corporation [4].

Put together, the two cases say something specific about this industry. Litigation here is routine, runs in both directions, and is usually about shape rather than technology — a port's boundary, a speaker's appearance. Bose won $5.68 million in 2001; Harman's 2024 case ended without a verdict or a disclosed payment. Neither outcome settled who builds better speakers, and the losing side of the 2001 case now sits inside the winning side's corporate family.

Meanwhile, three Chinese routes into the same market

While the Western end of the industry consolidated, the other end was doing something different — and it was not one strategy.

Anker started in Shenzhen in 2011 making replacement laptop batteries, sold almost exclusively on Amazon Marketplace rather than through retail, and built soundcore into a brand competing in active-noise-cancelling earbuds against Sony, Bose and Apple [6]. It then assembled a family of brands: eufy, ROAV, Anker SOLIX, Nebula, and eufyMake, which succeeded the discontinued AnkerMake 3D-printing line. It has since recalled about 481,000 power banks after fire reports, and a US congressional committee asked Commerce to investigate it in September 2025 [6].

Edifier was founded in Beijing in 1996, listed in Shenzhen in 2010 as 002351, and in 2012 bought STAX Ltd. — the Japanese maker of electrostatic headphones, whose own lineage runs back to 1938 [7]. It is the rarest thing in this group: a Chinese audio company whose controlling shareholder has never changed. For 2025 it reported revenue of about RMB 2.80 billion, down 4.97 per cent, with 2,665 employees [7].

FiiO was incorporated in Guangzhou in 2007 by engineers who came out of BBK, deliberately choosing portable hi-fi to avoid competing with their former employer. It makes portable players, desktop DACs and amplifiers, and — unusually — cassette and CD players. In e-earphone's published 2025 Japanese annual rankings it took all five top positions in portable players by unit sales, and its M27 was the best-selling player by revenue, ahead of Astell&Kern's flagship [8].

The finding that is actually interesting

The tempting conclusion is that China is taking over audio. The evidence does not support that, and the honest version is narrower and better.

Scale: Edifier's revenue is roughly US$390 million. FiiO's was reported at about US$22 million in 2023. Harman sits inside Samsung and equips more than 50 million cars. These are not comparable businesses, and none of the Chinese firms is close to buying a Bowers & Wilkins.

Where they win: FiiO's dominance in Japan is real but category-specific — portable players and desktop electronics. The same rankings put Technics first overall by revenue and Sony second, with FiiO third [8]. Anker competes on price-performance and volume, not on premium brand equity. Edifier bought a specialist, not a mass-market rival.

What that leaves: the categories the incumbents decided were too small to bother with. Dedicated portable players, desktop DACs, the enthusiast end of the market — segments Western and Japanese firms vacated as phones absorbed casual listening. In those, the incumbents are simply gone, and the replacement is Chinese.

So the accurate statement is not that China won audio. It is that consolidation at the top and abandonment in the middle left a gap, and three Chinese companies filled it by three different routes — owning the online shelf, buying a legend, or staying small and being good at something specific.

What the name on the box tells you

One practical consequence runs through all of this, and it is worth stating plainly.

The brand on a product reliably tells you who is responsible for the warranty, the software support and the marketing. It does not reliably tell you who designed it or who made it. A speaker's driver, circuit board and acoustic chamber can be a catalogue item from a factory in Guangdong — and the largest electronics manufacturers in the world by revenue are Taiwanese firms operating inside mainland China, not Chinese brands [6].

That is why this site treats manufacturing claims carefully. Saying "brand X is just a rebadged product from factory Y" is easy, usually unverifiable, and commercially damaging if wrong — manufacturing relationships sit behind confidentiality agreements and companies rarely confirm or deny them. We state such a relationship only when a document forces the disclosure, and otherwise describe the structure without naming pairs.

The short version

Sixteen premium audio brands, one Korean conglomerate, arrived at through fifty years of acquisitions and one medical company's expensive detour. Four independents left. Two lawsuits that show litigation is a running cost rather than a moat. Three Chinese companies winning the segments the incumbents walked away from, by three different methods, none of them the same.

And a speaker that says Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, JBL, harman/kardon, AKG, Infinity, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, Revel, Arcam, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Boston Acoustics, HEOS or Classé on the box is now, whichever one you bought, revenue for the same owner.

Entries in this story

More from the files

Sources

  1. HARMAN Completes Sound United Acquisition to Expand Premium Audio Leadership — HARMAN International (via Business Wire) (2026-09-19) ↩
  2. Masimo to Sell Consumer Audio Business to Harman International — audioXpress (2026-09-19) ↩
  3. Harman Kardon — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
  4. Harman International Industries Inc. v. VOXX International Corp. et al, No. 1:24-cv-01411 (D. Del.) docket — PacerMonitor (2026-09-19) ↩
  5. Bose Corporation v. JBL, Inc. and Infinity Systems Corporation, 274 F.3d 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2001) — Public.Resource.Org (2026-09-19) ↩
  6. Anker — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
  7. 漫步者: 2025年年度报告 — Edifier 2025 annual report — 新浪财经 (Sina Finance) (2026-09-19) ↩
  8. e☆イヤホン 2025年 年間ランキング — プレーヤー部門 — e-earphone (2026-09-19) ↩
  9. Masimo Corporation, Form 8-K, date of earliest event reported 15 February 2022 — Agreement and Plan of Merger with Viper Holdings Corporation (Sound United Series) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2026-09-21) ↩
  10. JBL Marks 80 Years with the Next Generation of Summit Everest and K2 — "About HARMAN Luxury Audio Group" — HARMAN Newsroom (2026-09-21) ↩
  11. Contacting HARMAN Luxury Technical Support — HARMAN Anytime Help Center (2026-09-21) ↩
  12. Harman emerges as Samsung's future mobility strategy subsidiary after takeover — Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea (2026-09-21) ↩