Buzz on Valley Biz: The Harman Experience Center showcases integrated hi-tech in Northridge

The big National Association of Broadcasters and CinemaCon entertainment industry trade shows are coming up in Vegas next month.

But there’s an alternative to that for industry pros, right here in the Valley. Harman’s new Experience Center, at the Northridge campus that has long been the home of its legendary JBL Speakers division, opened late last year.

The facility is designed to showcase the company’s Professional Solutions division’s capacity to meld products from its many subsidiaries into new, high-tech packages for a range of operations.

“The reason that we put this together is that most people know of us in terms of different products or technologies,” noted Erik Tarkiainen, Harman Professional Solutions vice president of Global Marketing and the guy who oversees the Experience Center. “They think of us as the JBL company or they knew us from the Martin Lighting company. That’s very important and we’re proud of all of these brands. But what we weren’t able to let people see was how they all come together.

“So, deliberately, this isn’t like a trade show where you have products on tables. What we really wanted to show was what could be done in a retail space, in a hotel space, in a live entertainment space when all of the stuff comes together.”

Beside JBL speakers and Martin Lighting, Harman also owns AKG headphones, Crown International amplifiers, Soundcraft mixers and AMX controllers and other manufacturers. Harman itself was acquired by Samsung Electronics about a year ago, and the South Korean giant’s video display monitors are deployed along with all the Harman groups’ components throughout the Experience Center.

Harman Kardon, famous for its car audio systems, remains the outfit’s consumer products label. The invitation-only Experience Center was built for professionals and bigger organizations to discover integrated solutions.

The 15,000-square-foot Experience Center, on the Northridge campus that’s been JBL’s home since 1976, is entered via a long hallway that appears framed with laser beams that go up its walls and across the ceiling. Those are actually thin video tubes, capable of blazing fast color changes linked to data from the giant, 18-foot-by-10-foot Samsung video wall at the end of the corridor.

The first display is an aspirational retail setup (Underarmor products are featured) that, like that mall in the movie “Minority Report,” combines bits and pieces of tech that is already being utilized individually in stores. While looking at mannequins you’re visually profiled, and products aimed at your gender and age demographic pop up on a wall screen. Products you touch or linger over get spotlighted, then prices and other related data about them appear on another screen.

A converted shipping container houses an array of AKG mics and headphones; you can test how each one sounds. For the aspiring singer-songwriter, there’s also a Soundcraft/JBL/AKG home recording studio setup that can be put together for under $1,000. Elsewhere, there’s a portable P.A. unit that you can roll out to Venice Beach for when you’re ready to start playing in public.

The biggest space within the Experience Center is the 6,000-square-foot, black-walled Live Entertainment Room soundstage, where arrays of speakers, a dizzying arsenal of quietly moving lights, non-toxic chemical haze misters and more of those video strips and display screens can be demonstrated for stage productions, nightclub use, live music venues and other immersive presentations.

There’s also a voice-enabled cognitive hotel room, where you can just ask a Siri-like entity to adjust the lights, open or close the drapes and perform such concierge tasks as making dinner reservations; the program can also be adapted for cruise ship and hospital use.

Placing the cost of his Experience Center at “a few million”— or as he likes to describe it, the price of a few trade shows Harman doesn’t need to attend now —Tarkiainen happily noted that over 1,000 visitors have checked out the Northridge installation in its three-plus months of operation. Harman has similar, somewhat smaller showcases in Shanghai and Singapore, and plans to open a fourth E.C. in London in a couple of weeks.

But Northridge is the flagship facility, and with good reason.

“We’re in the middle of the Valley,” Glaubke pointed out. “I think that that can’t be understated. Between lighting designers and rock bands and the like, the Valley is the true epicenter of rock ‘n’ roll. From where we’re situated, we’re within a stone’s throw of some of the most famous, iconic rock acts that have their spaces in a few mile radius of here. So we can not only pull in international travelers who are headed to Las Vegas for a trade show, but people who live in L.A. And the film and television industry is absolutely critical to us, too. The big studios have been through here.”

JBL’s history goes back to the dawn of talking movies, when L.A.-based audio engineer James Bullough Lansing began developing loudspeakers for studios and theaters in the late 1920s. He founded the company that was soon known by his initials in 1946. Its speakers became the standard for recording studio use, and as popular music got louder, consumers followed. Harman Kardon co-founder Sidney Harman bought the company in 1969.

Buzz on Valley Biz is an occasional profile that features a Valley business.

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