from Hacker News

Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk

by thibautg on 5/7/25, 5:28 PM with 326 comments

  • by trentnix on 5/8/25, 1:16 AM

    Now there are more avenues for Samsung to shove bloatware down our throats. I have a modestly high-end home theater and it is utterly maddening waiting for devices to “boot” and “handshake”. And after the wait, I’m presented with another “User Agreement” to sign that insists on shoveling ads down my throat and harvesting data.

    How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experience? Just like every retailer has embraced usury with their credit card programs, every technology company has decided they are in the data harvesting business. I’m so over it.

  • by dsr_ on 5/7/25, 6:31 PM

    There are lots of speaker manufacturers; I'm not too concerned about Polk and B&W.

    But! There are relatively few home theater receiver makers, and the Denon/Marantz siblings have been a big chunk of them for decades.

    (Sony, Yamaha, Onkyo, Denon. Nobody else covers the low and mid cost market.)

  • by EnPissant on 5/8/25, 12:37 AM

    Samsung acquired Harman Audio some years ago. Harman owns several well-known brands like JBL, Infinity, and Revel. They've invested billions in audio R&D, and Samsung has clearly benefited from that. Their soundbars now exceed the sound quality of Sonos systems that cost twice as much (or three times as much during sales).

    Denon and Marantz are arguably the best AVR manufacturers. It’ll be interesting to see what Samsung does with them. The home theater market is pretty outdated compared to other areas of audio. Car audio, soundbars, and professional systems mostly use active speakers and tightly integrated setups. Meanwhile, home theater is still stuck with passive speakers and a component-based approach.

    While some might see this as a monopoly concern, there's a chance Samsung could use its combined brands to modernize home audio. Imagine a fully wireless, all-in-one home theater system with active speakers and centralized room correction. That could be a real step forward.

  • by steveBK123 on 5/8/25, 11:10 AM

    It's a shame that big box stores (Walmart, Target) / online retail (Amazon) / brand owned stores (Apple, Bose) have all conspired to reduce consumer choice. Even in big cities, there's practically no specialty stores to go to in which I can demo a product category across brands.

    Think pre-GFC peak Best Buy & the old CompUSA/Circuit City chains of the past or even Apple before they captured every other product category and actually had entire tables of headphone and speaker brands.

    It strikes me as very hard for any new brand to come about in this environment if they aren't already big enough to have their own storefront. As you are generally left shopping online by price (DTC / China alphabet soup branded sop on AMZN) or by known brand (I'll just get a Sony / Apple / Sonos / Bose).

  • by cjk on 5/8/25, 4:46 AM

    I spent several years at B&W prior to the Sound United and Masimo era, so this news makes me incredibly sad. I hope Samsung doesn’t run the company into the ground.

    There are lots of good people left at B&W. If they are afforded the autonomy they deserve, everything will be fine. If not…I guess we’ll see.

  • by bhouston on 5/7/25, 6:55 PM

    I feel that sound bars + speakers directly attached to TVs has decimated the "home theatre receiver."

    "Back in the day", home theatre receivers made sense when you wanted Radio + CD inputs in addition to the TV input. But radio and CD players are gone. There is just TV. Even when I do audio, I run it through the TV.

    Thus why do you need a separate box? It just seems like a waste.

    Instead everyone these days are just attaching their speaker systems directly to the TV.

    And with wireless speakers, e.g. Sonos and similar systems, a centralized audio amplifier just doesn't make sense at all.

    So all that is left is ultra-high end applications and there are few of those.

  • by justin66 on 5/8/25, 1:39 PM

    The most interesting recent acquisition of this kind I'm aware of is the Bose acquisition of McIntosh. As this article [0] notes:

    Dr. Amar Bose donated the majority of his namesake company to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So technically, MIT now owns both McIntosh and Sonus faber, two of the biggest players in luxury audio. (MIT has non-voting shares of Bose, so although the university owns the majority of the company, it does not control business decisions.)

    [0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/bose-acquires-mcintosh

  • by ryukoposting on 5/8/25, 1:00 PM

    How many people hear "JBL" and think "Bluetooth speaker" instead of "high end stereo gear?"

    How many people hear B&W or Harman-Kardon and think "logo on my car's speakers" rather than "high end stereo gear?"

    How many people hear "Mark Levinson" and think either "Lexus" or "who's Mark?"

    I genuinely didn't know that there were still real, standalone speakers and head units made under half these brands that aren't whitelabeled Bluetooth detritus.

  • by mrandish on 5/8/25, 3:19 AM

    I'm a little surprised these four companies combined sold for only $350M.

  • by bob1029 on 5/7/25, 6:53 PM

    Polk used to produce some of the best bang-for-buck loudspeakers available in traditional retail channels.

    The RTi12 was easily the best floor standing speaker I've ever owned, potentially at any cost.

  • by vvladymyrov on 5/8/25, 1:36 PM

    Fun fact that Masimo acquired Sound United in 2022 for 1B. Neither market nor investors were happy about this strange choice of company with health equipment focus doing this move. In 2024 Masimo changed CEO and now divesting audio brands business for just 350M.

  • by newsclues on 5/8/25, 9:57 AM

    What is the alternatives (that aren’t Chinese)?

    Also why don’t TVs and AVRs use display port instead of hdmi (license costs)?

  • by tzs on 5/7/25, 10:37 PM

    I've got a Samsung TV and a Samsung monitor in the same room. About 20% of the time when I use the TV remote from the couch to turn off the TV it also turns of the monitor.

    If I'm at the computer and turn off the TV with the TV remote it turns off the monitor the majority of the time.

    I wonder if Samsung will manage to make to so Denon and Marantz receivers will also sometimes turn off when you turn off a Samsung TV?

  • by Animats on 5/7/25, 6:42 PM

    must...have...name...brands

    Recently I was looking for a toaster. Target has a nice selection of toasters. Look down into the slots, and they are all exactly the same.

    There were, at peak, only three different VCRs. All those brands used one of three standard mechanisms. But you could get a hundred different cases.

  • by lysace on 5/7/25, 7:39 PM

    "Hifi" was sort of mainstream for a while in the early 2000s. Remember when everyone went all-in on sound systems for their "home cinemas", very often spending serious money on 5.1 systems?

    Then Netflix, the race to the bottom in terms of bitstreams and portable devices happened.

  • by jmartin2683 on 5/8/25, 10:34 AM

    Audiophiles are forced to finally admit that their real hobby is just spending money.

  • by marcoc on 5/7/25, 6:30 PM

  • by numpad0 on 5/8/25, 7:59 AM

    > Too many requests -- error 999.

    In case anyone need it, here's[0] Wikipedia list article for HTTP status codes(200, 404, etc.) "Too Many Requests" is 429.

    0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

  • by relistan on 5/8/25, 7:44 AM

    These brands face massive competition from Chinese no-brand electronics on one end, and Apple, Sonos, and many others at the other end.

    Basically any time a market changes drastically you see older players consolidate. Too often that leads to one big collapse of the consolidated entity. We’ll see what happens in time.

  • by scblock on 5/7/25, 6:47 PM

    Ah, so just like with AKG they'll get rid of everyone who knew anything and then slap old (and already lower tier through their own lack of efforts) audio names on hot garbage.

  • by dredmorbius on 5/7/25, 7:02 PM

    Well, that's four brands I'm never touching again.

    Far too many bad Samsung experiences.

  • by t1234s on 5/8/25, 1:31 PM

    My 2005 Marantz receiver just went up in value

  • by Uptrenda on 5/8/25, 4:22 AM

    Great, lets wait for samsung to ruin Denon.

  • by TimByte on 5/8/25, 2:40 PM

    Kind of wild to think that one company now owns such a wide swath of both mass-market and premium audio brands

  • by fblp on 5/7/25, 7:29 PM

    I wonder if this will flag antitrust issues?

  • by lnx01 on 5/8/25, 8:50 AM

    I really hope they bring back the Denon AK-DL3

  • by rayiner on 5/8/25, 11:52 AM

    My left wing idea is that the government should be much more aggressive in preventing his sort of consolidation. Every industry is like the same handful of companies, with numerous “brands.” (These particular brands are all already owned by a single entity.)

    I’ve got an “Amana” heat pump. It’s really a Daikin, and is part for part compatible with Goodman, also owned by Diakin. But all the brands are sold to customers to create the illusion of choice. Maybe we could at least have a “real name” policy for companies and products.

  • by SoftTalker on 5/8/25, 12:53 AM

    Marantz used to be top of the line home audio gear, hand built, point to point wired. Now just another stick-on label on generic Korean mass produced systems. Sad to see them and other former great names in audio reduced to that.

  • by JKCalhoun on 5/8/25, 8:59 AM

    How much do brands mean anymore?

  • by j45 on 5/8/25, 3:21 PM

    Disappointing.

    Time to grab current equipment while you can. Go a little nicer than you would normally for longevity.

    I have friends commenting that they have Samsung TVs infested with ads it did not have when they first purchased it.

  • by wizardforhire on 5/8/25, 2:55 PM

    Countdown to enshitification in three… two…

    I forsee a future where marantz amps have really annoying separate startup and shutdown songs and jingles for increments of volume obviously ascending and descending for increase and decrease in volume respectively with unavoidable long melodies for each power of ten, which of course can not be skipped or disabled by the user and also pause all ui inputs while being played causing the unit to grind to a halt if trying to change the volume too quickly and even causing the unit to crash as the melodies over lap and cause a buffer overflow… to be fixed never of course.

  • by stuaxo on 5/9/25, 8:18 AM

    Remember Denon and Marantz being really good back in the day, will they be enshittified now?

  • by notfed on 5/7/25, 6:28 PM

    Great...Samsung buying the competition. Denon makes great audio receivers. I expect them to turn to junk soon.

  • by ivape on 5/8/25, 12:50 AM

    I wonder how much Chi-Fi has to do with this. If they are buying brands, then I doubt they care about the hardware technology. They might have a strong idea to pump Chi-Fi into these brands and let the brands do the selling.