Whether you’re at a concert, a sports event, or any other venue that requires amplified sound, the quality of sound can have an immeasurable impact on your experience. For more than six decades HARMAN has delivered high quality and reliable audio solutions to an incredible array of venues across the country and abroad. The HARMAN Professional Solutions team brought world-class sound, through its JBL Professional speaker brand, to prominent venues, including Madison Square Garden, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Ryman Auditorium, Radio City Music Hall, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Six Flags, cruise ships, and many NBA, NFL and MLB stadiums, enhancing fans’ experiences. 

Rigorous Quality Standards

Before our JBL Professional speakers are ready to energize fans, we put them through stringent reliability testing to ensure the equipment meets HARMAN’s quality standards. When our venue partners deploy HARMAN products, they expect our equipment to transfer exceptional audio in a diverse range of conditions. In addition, our customers demand that our products stand the test of time and other stresses that the equipment may endure once installed. To meet and exceed those expectations, our HARMAN Professional Solutions team employs a number of reliability testing including a chamber for prolonged UV exposure, ovens for excessive heat, shake plates for severe vibrations, and a hydraulic pull apparatus for bracket and structure integrity.

The 100-Hour Torture Test

In addition to this rigorous testing, our team of engineers employ the 100-hour torture test. In a 20’x20’ chamber with 8-inch-thick walls, similar to a bank vault, we put an excruciating audio signal at high volume through the speakers for four days. The engineers conduct deep analysis of the speakers’ performance throughout the test and re-engineered until the speaker exceeds the requirements. The rigorous inspection goes above and beyond what the product would typically face in its real world application, so our partners can feel confident that our equipment will deliver at every single event.

Accurate Measurement for the Perfect Sound

Leveraging Linear Spatial Reference Technology, our team measures the system in 360 degrees around its speakers, to ensure that the product has a consistent response for all direct and reflected sound. After the equipment is engineered to HARMAN’s standards, our team puts the product to the test, with the help of one of our four anechoic chambers to measure the performance. In order to yield the most accurate A/B test results, JBL manufactured the only known Speaker Shuffler, a hydraulic-driven, computer-operated device capable of swapping the speakers into a precise center position within four seconds. This blind test is conducted against competitor speakers in the same class, or against speakers in the same brand family. The goal of the test is to elicit feedback from professional or general consumer listeners that will assure each product reaches its desired performance.

“These rigorous test cycles to qualify the product give the engineering team vital feedback and confidence in the product designs,” said Geoffrey Christopherson, Director of Acoustic Center of Competence for HARMAN Professional Solutions. “The engineers learn a tremendous amount when running destructive testing, which leads to opportunities to innovate and improve product designs.”

At HARMAN, we are committed to delivering quality and reliable world-class audio equipment to our customers so they can create memorable experiences for audiences globally. If you are interested in how speakers and other reliability tested products from HARMAN, including lighting, sound mixing and video control, are deployed around the world, visit: https://pro.harman.com/case_studies