The new HARMAN Experience Center in Northridge near Los Angeles is an adults playground!

The new HARMAN Experience Center in Northridge near Los Angeles is an adults playground! Opened on December 4th I was among the very first to visit the new Experience Center for North America. It’s basically like a Showroom, but more interactive and engaging as the products are showcased in real-life scenarios. This is now the second Experience Center for HARMAN Professional Solutions, the global leader in audio, video, lighting and control systems, followed by the one in Singapore, and soon to be joined by another one in London. Each HARMAN Experience Center is designed to demonstrate how HARMAN solutions uniquely address customer needs across multiple vertical markets. Right by entering the Experience Center at the HARMAN Campus you are greeted by the three Grammy Awards HARMAN won over the years, one for JBL Professional® in 2005, another one for AKG Acoustics ® in 2010 and the latest one in 2014 for Lexicon Pro®.

On an area of 15,000-square-foot, almost 1400 sqm, the multi-functional facility showcases HARMAN Professional Solutions product solutions in a variety of entertainment and enterprise market applications, such as a Connected Retail Experience, Connected Huddle Space, Voice Enabled Cognitive Hotel Room, Home Recording, Networked AVoIP, Sound and light installations for worship houses or Clubs/Concerts and much more. In the Northridge Experience Center, you can see and test out the demonstration of the integration of HARMAN brands including JBL Professional®, AKG Acoustics®, AMX®, BSS Audio®, Crown International®, dbx Professional®, DigiTech®, Lexicon Pro®, Martin®, Soundcraft® and Studer®.

Besides the Home Recording area, fully equipped with headphones and a high-quality microphone, which was so fun to just play around, my highlight was the example for a Hotel Room. Via voice recognition “Hey JBL, open the curtains” you were able to control the room, from opening the curtains to playing music to controlling the light. If you stay in a Hotel once in a while you might know the struggle of finding out which light is controlled with which light switch, or where to open or close the roller blinds. If more Hotels would trust in such revolutionary products, it would save so much precious time for both leisure and business travellers!
To read more about our exclusive Insight into the truly stunning World of HARMAN, check out the (upcoming) blog posts of Emma Loggins, Alice Chase, Shelley VanWitzenburg, Dawn Gibson- Thigpen or Gigi Leonard, and stay tuned for my own upcoming articles focussing more on the process of how sound and a speaker is made, and the awesome sound system inside the new Kia Stinger.

One last thing: The Experience Center is open by appointment only to HARMAN and Samsung customers, employees, distributors, sales representatives, dealers, artists and other industry professionals for meetings, performances, productions, hospitality events and more. Therefore, it won’t be possible to “just visit” the Product Showroom, even though I’d personally love to have such a showroom near where I live, with an integrated Café, to test out new Products, play with them, drink a Coffee or Tea, and eventually but a new product such as headphones or portable speakers right away.