WhereIsAtlas · Audio
How Harman Kardon Started With $5,000 Each
Two men walked out of a public-address company in 1953, put in $5,000 each, and built the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver. The company is now a brand inside Samsung.
In 1953 Sidney Harman resigned from the David Bogen Company, where he had risen from engineer to general manager over 14 years, and took Bogen's chief designer Bernard Kardon with him. Each invested $5,000 and they opened a facility in Westbury, New York. Their 1954 Festival D-1000 is generally described as the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver. The company bought JBL in 1969, was sold to Beatrice Foods, was bought back in 1980, and has been a wholly owned Samsung Electronics subsidiary since March 2017.
A resignation, and a boss who came along
Sidney Harman's first job out of college was at the David Bogen Company, building public-address systems [1]. He stayed 14 years, working his way from engineer to sales manager, and by the 1950s he was general manager of the firm [1].
He wanted Bogen to build a better audio system for American homes. Bogen wasn't interested. So Harman resigned in 1953 — and took his own boss with him. Bernard Kardon was Bogen's chief designer, and he left to become co-founder [1].
They named the company Harman/Kardon Inc., each put in $5,000 of capital, and set up production in Westbury, New York [1]. Ten thousand dollars, between them, and a rented building.
The machine that made the company
The first products appeared in 1954, one year after founding. There were two: the A-100, a seven-tube AM/FM tuner with automatic frequency control at $70.50, and the Festival D-1000, a receiver at $189.50 [1].
The D-1000 is the one that matters. It put a wide-bandwidth FM tuner, a preamplifier and a 20-watt amplifier with automatic loudness control onto a single chassis [1]. That is what "integrated receiver" means: one box instead of a stack of separate components, which meant a buyer no longer had to know how to match a tuner to an amplifier. It is generally described as the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver, and it is the ancestor of the receiver sitting under most modern televisions.
Harman's own recollection of the reaction was "we knocked the hell out of them; they were trembling with Shostakovich's Fifth" — and that "nobody had heard anything like that in his living room" [1].
That is the whole commercial insight, and it was not about better sound in the abstract. It was about making high fidelity something a non-technical person could buy.
An engineering record worth listing plainly
Between 1954 and 1970 the company did an unusual amount of first-rate work in a short time.
In 1958 it introduced the Festival TA-230, the first high-fidelity simulcast stereo receiver — which achieved stereo by taking one channel from the AM band and one from FM, because FM stereo broadcasting did not yet exist [1]. In 1959, two years before the FCC formally approved FM multiplex stereo, Harman Kardon was already selling the MA-250 multiplex adapter that could be fitted to its tuners [1]. Its Citation II amplifier that same year delivered 60 watts per channel across 18 to 60,000 Hz [1].
In 1970 came the CAD5, described as the first stereophonic cassette deck with Dolby B noise reduction [1]. In 1980, the Citation XX high-current amplifier, designed by Finnish engineer Matti Otala — who had identified transient intermodulation distortion in 1970 — was called the world's best-sounding power amplifier by the editors of The Audio Critic [1].
Bernard Kardon retired in 1957, well before most of it [1].
From one receiver to a portfolio of brands
In 1969 Harman bought JBL, the loudspeaker manufacturer [1]. That single acquisition is the origin of everything the modern company is: not a maker of one product line, but an owner of brands aimed at different customers.
The corporate history then gets genuinely strange, and it is worth following because it explains why the brand is now where it is.
In the 1970s Sidney Harman was appointed Under Secretary of Commerce in the Carter administration. US law required appointees to have no direct business interests in day-to-day operations, so he sold the company to the conglomerate Beatrice Foods for $100 million [1]. Beatrice then sold off large parts of it — including the original Harman Kardon division — and by 1980 only about 60 per cent of the company remained [1].
After the Carter years Harman bought Harman International back, for $55 million [1]. But the receiver group, which was the heart of the business, was not included: Beatrice had already sold it to the Japanese company Shin-Shirasuna. Harman had to buy that back separately in 1985 to restore the company to the shape it had had before 1976 [1].
By 1991 the group was a loose collection of companies each selling to its own loyal customers, spread across 21 divisions [1]. Harman consolidated them into five and removed duplicated functions like accounting. The effect was immediate: a $19.8 million loss on $587 million of sales in fiscal 1991 became a $3.5 million profit on $605 million of sales in fiscal 1992 [1].
Where it ended up
In March 2017 Harman became a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics [2].
In September 2025 it completed the acquisition of Sound United, the former consumer audio business of Masimo, adding Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, Boston Acoustics, HEOS and Classé to a lineup that already included JBL, AKG, Infinity, Lexicon, Mark Levinson and Revel [2]. More than 50 million cars on the road carry Harman audio or connected-car systems [2].
What the story shows
It is a good founder story, and it is also a lesson in what happens to good founder stories.
Two men left one company, put in modest money, and built a product that changed how people bought audio. Seventy years later, the brand they founded is one line item in a portfolio owned by a Korean conglomerate, and the founder's own company had to buy its own receiver division back from a Japanese firm after a food company sold it.
None of that is a failure. It is what scale looks like: the engineering is what gets remembered, and the ownership changes hands. The D-1000 is a museum piece. The business it started is a division of Samsung.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Harman Kardon — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- HARMAN Completes Sound United Acquisition to Expand Premium Audio Leadership — HARMAN International (via Business Wire) (2026-09-19) ↩
- The Harman Kardon Saga — Harman Kardon (2026-09-19)
- FESTIVAL D1000 — Harman Kardon Support (2026-09-19)