Who invented jbl speakers

The company floundered until when it partnered with Altec Service Corporation- which did movie sound maintenance and repair. Lansing Sound, Incorporated. May Take a look at this new video JBL made detailing their history.

JBL products grown old rather well and are very easy to sell in 2nd hand. Name required. Email will not be published required. Thomas, who was at that time the Treasurer of Marquardt. The company moved its offices and manufacturing facilities to the Marquardt plant at Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California.

At the end of its second fiscal year in , James B. Lansing further bought out the interest held by Messrs. Snow and Noble so that he became the sole spokesman for the company in negotiations with Marquardt. In early , Marquardt was purchased by the General Tire Company, who were not interested in continuing the relation with Lansing. The tie between Marquardt and Lansing was severed, and at that point, William Thomas left Marquardt and assumed an important role in the operation of James B.

The company then moved to new headquarters at Fletcher Drive in Los Angeles. During the first three years James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated made no profit at all; it barely stayed afloat. Over the short span of three years, the company occupied four locations, and that had an impact on production efficiencies.

There were rarely enough funds to pay all suppliers. One supplier who was very sympathetic to Lansing and his work was Robert Arnold, whom we referred to earlier. It may be said that it is through the sufferance of Arnold that JBL is in existence today. At one time, James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated, had an indebtedness to Arnold Engineering Company stretching over a period of two years.

We are not sure why Arnold provided this extra measure of lenience to Lansing, but it may have had to do with the fact that Lansing was an avid promoter of Alnico V magnet material for loudspeaker use. On Thursday, September 24th, , at the age of 47, James B. Lansing passed away. Lansing had been wise enough to secure a life insurance policy in the name of his company during the late forties. When Lansing died he left his one-third share of the company to his wife.

During the early fifties, Thomas negotiated the purchase of this amount from Mrs. Lansing and thus became the sole owner of James B. During the late forties and early fifties, the value of the name Lansing as a trade identification was extremely high. Up to about , the James B. The company was quite small at that time, but by the mid-fifties it had become apparent that the new company was here to stay and was becoming a more significant force in the marketplace. At that time, Carrington was pressed by many of his field people to do something about this flagrant use of the name Lansing by the new company.

George Carrington and Alvis Ward of Altec then entered a long round of polite out-of-court negotiations with Thomas, and they agreed that the new company would cease and desist in labeling of the product as Lansing. A decision was made by Thomas to capitalize on the initials, JBL, in identifying the company. The initials JBL, along with the familiar exclamation point have become synonymous with the current identity of James B. Nobody remembers exactly where the exclamation point came from. Early in his stewardship of the company, William Thomas made a commitment to design excellence and engineering integrity.

These have been apparent over the years in innovative designs in both technical and visual aspects. In , JBL departed from the standard method of making pot structures using sections of seamless steel tubing. They introduced sand cast pot structures made of ductile iron. As the consumer high fidelity movement got under way in the early and mid-fifties, Thomas secured the services of industrial designer, Robert Hartsfield, and together they created the Hartsfield system which was still built in Japan as late as the mid eighties.

In , Thomas introduced an Alnico V version of the Western Electric high-frequency driver, a four-inch diaphragm compression driver whose basic design dated back to the early thirties. The basic design had not been available for some twenty years or so.

The new driver was dubbed the , and it immediately put JBL into the theater business. Contracts with both the Ampex Corporation and Westrex, the export division of Western Electric, brought forth a number of ancillary developments in the design of acoustic lenses and radial horns for theater use.

The striking design of the Paragon remained a viable acoustical design for about a quarter century after its introduction in Arnold Wolf of Berkeley, California, took credit for the stunning industrial design of the product. The work done during the mid-fifties on theater systems provided the basis for a major thrust into the professional sound business in general. The first area to be pursued by the company was that of studio monitor systems. These early designs and extensions of the basic technology made JBL a leading supplier of monitors worldwide.

The coming of age of Rock and Roll music during the sixties underscored the need for heavy-duty transducers that could take the mighty abuse given them during concerts. The basic Lansing design, the D, became the signal example of what could be done in this area. It was Leo Fender of the Fender Guitar Company who identified the D as the ideal loudspeaker for his electric guitar designs.

Through a contract with Fender, JBL provided a specialized version of this loudspeaker for that company. Subsequently, JBL has manufactured a number of other designs from ten-inch models all the way up to eighteen-inch models targeted for the music performer.

The professional line as we know it today took form in the late sixties, and it was a largely consolidation of previous OEM work that had been done for various companies, such as: Ampex, Westrex, General Railway Signal, and Fender.

Thus, in a relatively short period of time, JBL came up with a full-blown line of products to serve many segments of the professional market. Three and a half years later Harman re-acquired JBL, and the company continues as a major force in both consumer high-fidelity and professional markets. JBL is the leading producer of branded loudspeakers in the United States today. The company is also a significant force overseas, with more than half of the output of the company sold in export markets.

Lansing was not an outgoing family man. He had four children whom he cared for a great deal. He would spend occasional weekends entertaining them, taking them to the park, and so forth. But for the most part, he spent relatively little time at home; typically, weekends would be spent at the factory where he would work on new projects and processes.

In the old McKinley Avenue plant, the only sofa was in the ladies lounge. After long hours of agonizing over a process or a new invention, Lansing would often go to sleep on the sofa on Sunday night —only to be discovered the following Monday morning when the first secretary came in — usually with a shriek! Somehow, this does not ring true with the notion we have of the man as one who respected technology and had such high regard for precision processes.

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