Harmony Unleashed: The Sonic Alchemy Behind HARMAN's JBL Speakers - A Musical Journey through Cutting-Edge Sound Engineering

HARMAN’s Global Center of Acoustic Excellence in Northridge, California, is where some of the finest audio engineers and product managers in the world conduct research, development, and design for future JBL speakers. In the dozens of labs and listening rooms throughout the campus, voicing, and tuning techniques are used to create the perfect audio experience for our customers.

What music do we use at HARMAN to tune or demonstrate loudspeakers and headphones? We had our engineer and product teams from HARMAN Luxury Audio and HARMAN Professional share with us a few of their audiophile test tracks. We’ve compiled some of them for you.

Products tested with these tracks include Luxury Audio’s JBL 4349, 4329P, L82, L52, and our legendary L100 Classic loudspeakers. Our Professional Solutions group has used some of these tracks to test and demo our large format JBL SRX900 and JBL VTX A-Series line array systems that are sound-supporting live concerts around the world, in addition to our JBL Professional 700- and 300-Series studio monitors found in recording studios. If you’re not listening to the tracks on these products, you might on the JBL Tour Pro M2 or Mark Levinson No. 5909 headphones, which were also developed with cuts from this playlist.

While different genres and styles, what all these tracks have in common is that their foundational recording techniques and playback quality contain, among many things, a wide and dense spectrum that makes it possible to hear any resonances, bandwidth limitations, spectral imbalances in the device. This allows the listener to appreciate nuances of our loudspeakers and headphones best.

If you’re interested in why Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car made this playlist and has been a staple in testing speakers for 35 years, HARMAN’S Senior Fellow and Past President of the Audio Engineering Society, Dr. Sean Olive explains in this SoundStage! Access article.