INSIDE STORY: SAMSUNG
Allan Devantier joined Samsung from Harman, and set up Samsung’s California audio lab which has been responsible for, among other things, the renaissance in the company’s soundbar performance. Only later did Samsung purchase the whole of Harman, and when we last spoke in 2018, Devantier was emphasising that the two were operating entirely separately. But then last year Samsung’s soundbars arrived ‘badged’ to harman-kardon. This year they’re back to being just Samsung. So we asked Allan about the latest developments from the California lab, and what had gone on with that curious badging incident…
ALLAN DEVANTIER: So the ‘every year’ thing, actually, that’s good, because it does give us an opportunity to make incremental improvements, and that’s nice. And the process is not that difficult. If you look at the K950, and N950, or the Q80 and Q90 I think they were called, they were really similar — they got improved, no question about it, but it wasn’t a great leap of engineering like it was with this new one. It’s an opportunity to get some subtle tweaks in there. And I think we got up to three versions of that one.
SOUND+IMAGE: So we last spoke when you’d just launched the first Samsung
