we can see that there are many successful audio companies that follow the science: JBL/Revel/Harmon, KEF, Ascend Acoustics, Genelec, Adam Audio, Neumann, Kali, etc. and so on.
Me thinks, the number of successful companies not following ´the science´ is much, much longer. Not to speak of those being surprisingly successful in recent years openly opposing the ´Harman science´, promoting their own understanding of superior sound quality: first and foremost Kii Audio, B&O, B&W, Dynaudio, Sonos, Bose, Perlisten, Magico, Focal, Elac, to name just a few, who definitely would have both the engineering capabilities and manpower to optimize measurements.
An interesting example to discuss is B&W, as they were following ´the science´ for quite a while. Remember some pretty linear, in the traditional sense ´neutral´, monitors in studios originating from the 1990s (Matrix 801, DM600). They had abandoned the idea of ideal anechoic frequency response, and undoubtedly had thrown quite a number of axioms on ´linearity´ out of the window, beginning somewhen in the late 1990s, and immediately started to being pretty successful with their higher end speakers.
B&W, Focal and KEF are still the dominant players in terms of inventory in the used market. What this tells me, that at the very least high end, HiFi speakers sold in the last few years are B&W, Focal and KEF.
It is an indirect indicator of what has been bought in mass quantities over the course of the last 2 or 3 decades. So indeed, absence of used products is indirect proof of unsuccessful products in recent past.
So, what do you make of the almost total absence of used high end speakers, which back in the day had been marketed as ´perfectly measuring´, ´ designed with utmost sound research´, ´perfectly in line with the internal science of good sound´, or ´proven to be successful in blind comparison tests against the competition´. That was the message for lots of Harman brands, was it not? I mean, Revel under Harman was basically marketed as the brand ´incorporating scientific ideals´, and lots of up-price JBLs were heavily marketed like that as well. Was not really following the beginning of these campaigns, but would roughly date them from like 2000 to around 2015.
So, if ´the science´ was successful in understanding people´s buying decisions, and leading to vastly superior products, we would see a lot of them now on the used market. Perfect timing. Where are they? Probably have never been produced and sold, would be a logical conclusion. Which coincides with what Dr. Olive was reporting, that Harman´s internal research institution turned towards earphones, headphones, immersive audio and surround, more or less abandoning loudspeaker research in the early 2010s.
But the used market is also an indicator of what people are dissatisfied with by today. Otherwise they would not sell it, right? While I can easily understand why people sell Focals or B&Ws in mass quantities - they have changed their sound tuning, they might not meet today´s expectation in terms of sound character, they are difficult to set up in a new room, majority of them is chunky - it is difficult to find an explanation for KEFs being sold. Other than lots of people are dissatisfied with the sound, which cannot be easily explained by sounding different in different rooms over moving. So, why?
Harman didn’t even apply their own research (yet).
Without having any insights or having ever been into commercial side of hi-fi or pro audio, I would assume they did. Literally tens of millions of portable bluetooth speakers, boomboxes, party speakers, headphones, earphones were marketed under JBL brand, and made it undoubtedly the market leader in several of these categories. It is not a stretch to assume the research was advantageous in such competitive markets.
It just seems not to have worked out for high end stereo loudspeakers. At least I haven't seen a single successful product coming out of that yet. And let us face it: if ´loudspeaker research´ was abandoned almost 15 years ago (according to Dr. Olive), after decades of heavily marketing ´research-based speakers´, do you seriously believe they would start implementing it in future?
Mind you, they have just bought B&W, presumably beginning to promote these products as their true loudspeaker heritage and spearhead of sound quality research.
