JBL is an American audio equipment manufacturer headquartered in Los Angeles, California, United States. JBL serves the customer home and professional market. The professional market includes studios, installed/tour/portable sound, cars, music production, DJ, cinema markets, etc. JBL is owned by Harman International, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics. JBL was founded by James Bullough Lansing (1902–1949), an American audio engineer and loudspeaker designer best known for establishing two audio companies that bear his name, Altec Lansing and JBL, the latter taken from his initials. History Lansing and his business partner Ken Decker started a company in 1927, in Los Angeles, manufacturing six- and eight-inch speaker drivers for radio consoles and radio sets. The firm was named Lansing Manufacturing Company, from March 1, 1927. In 1933, head of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) sound department, Douglas Shearer, dissatisfied with the loudspeakers of Western Electric and RCA, decided to develop his own. John Hilliard, Robert Stephens, and John F. Blackburn were part of the team that developed the Shearer Horn, with Lansing Manufacturing producing the 285 compression driver and the 15XS bass driver. The Shearer Horn gave the desired improvements and Western Electric and RCA received the contracts to each build 75 units. Western Electric named them Diaphonics, and RCA used them in their RCA Photophones. Lansing Manufacturing was the only firm selling them as Shearer Horns. In 1936, the Shearer Horn received the Academy Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Based on the experience developed with the Shearer Horn, Lansing produced the Iconic System loudspeaker for cinemas. The Iconic was a two-way speaker using a 15-inch woofer for the low frequencies and a compression driver for the highs. In 1939, Decker was killed in an airplane crash, the company soon began having financial troubles and, in 1941, Lansing Manufacturing Company was bought by Altec Service Corporation, after which the name changed to "Altec Lansing". After Lansing's contract expired in 1946, he left Altec Lansing and founded Lansing Sound in which later the name changed to "James B. Lansing Sound" and was further shortened to "JBL Sound". In 1946, JBL produced their first products, the model D101 15-inch loudspeaker and the model D175 high-frequency driver. The D175 remained in the JBL catalog through the 1970s. Both of these were near-copies of Altec Lansing products. The first original product was the D130, a 15-inch transducer for which a variant