The Man Who Built JBL — and How the Brand Ended Up Inside Samsung
The Man Who Built JBL — and How the Brand Ended Up Inside Samsung
JBL is one of the most recognized names in audio on the planet — the speaker at the beach, the amp at the party, the monitor in the recording studio. Fewer people know it's named after a single engineer, or that the brand now sits inside the same corporate family as Samsung, one of the biggest names on this site's own shelves.
An Engineer Before He Was a Brand
James Bullough Lansing founded the company in 1946 in Los Angeles, but he was already a serious figure in professional audio by then. He'd previously co-founded Altec Lansing, and before that, worked on cinema and theater sound systems for MGM through the 1930s and 40s — the era when "talkies" needed genuinely good sound engineering for the first time, and Lansing was one of the people solving that problem. When he left Altec, he founded James B. Lansing Sound, Inc. — what would become JBL.
The company's early years were difficult. Lansing died in 1949, just three years after founding it, reportedly under serious financial and personal strain. It's a somber note in an otherwise triumphant story, and the company he built continued under new leadership rather than folding.
From Recording Studios to Woodstock
What Lansing had started, others carried forward with real momentum. JBL speakers became a fixture in professional recording studios — the kind of monitor serious engineers mixed records on — and in large-scale live sound. JBL PA systems were used at Woodstock in 1969, putting the brand's engineering in front of half a million people at one of the most famous concerts in history.
Who Owns JBL Today
Harman International acquired JBL in 1969, folding it into a portfolio that would eventually include AKG, Harman Kardon, Mark Levinson, and Revel — a genuine stable of serious audio brands under one roof. Then, in 2017, Samsung Electronics acquired Harman International outright for roughly $8 billion.
That means JBL is now, through Harman, part of the Samsung group — the same conglomerate behind the Galaxy phones and tablets sold on this exact site. Two of the biggest names in a Naml order might both trace back to the same parent company without most shoppers ever realizing it.
Why It Still Matters
None of that corporate history changes what JBL is known for on the ground: loud, durable, genuinely good-sounding portable speakers built for real use — the beach, the pool, the car, the balcony party. The Flip, Charge, and Xtreme lines are some of the most reached-for names in outdoor audio in the UAE specifically, where speakers spend as much time outside as in. The engineering pedigree behind the name is a century of serious acoustic work condensed into something you can throw in a beach bag.
Browse the current JBL lineup on our Featured Brands page.
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