The same fixes keep getting tried, but they keep failing for the same reasons across multiple brands.
Several legacy hi-fi brands are facing the same problem at the same time. Revenue keeps falling, CEOs keep getting replaced, and ownership keeps changing hands. But none of it is fixing the problem.
As a result, many legacy brands are struggling to stay profitable, while newer and cheaper audio brands gain ground.
This recent shakeups across luxury audio point to a structural change in the market. And the reasons become clear once you look closer.
The Cycle That Keeps Repeating
Bang & Olufsen and Devialet sit in different corners of luxury audio. One is a Danish electronics institution while the other is a French tech-world darling. Yet both have spent recent years running through the same loop of falling revenue, leadership exits, and strategic pivots that don’t meaningfully change the trajectory.
On January 7, 2026, B&O terminated CEO Kristian Teär after revenue declined 3.2% year-on-year. The move echoed an earlier episode. In January 2008, B&O fired CEO Torben Sorensen after profits fell.
Devialet’s path looks different, but it leads to a similar place. The company built its reputation on products like the Phantom speaker, backed by heavyweight investors including Xavier Niel, Bernard Arnault, and Jacques-Antoine Granjon.
However, recent launches struggled to gain traction, and the company posted a €15 million loss
.
Because of this, its CEO, Franck Lebouchard, and co-founder, Pierre-Emmanuel Calmel, both left in 2023. New leadership then cut costs and pursued partnerships with Huawei and automaker BYD.
Across these cases, the pattern holds: leadership is replaced, a new direction is announced, and the underlying economics remain stubbornly unchanged.
From Acquisition to Consolidation
When leadership changes fail to stop the slide, the next move is often outside investment. That was the thinking behind Masimo’s $1 billion acquisition of Sound United in April 2022. The bet was straightforward: stronger ownership and scale could stabilize a group of well-known audio brands.
But the results were mixed at best. Masimo’s consumer audio division lost money quickly. By Q3 2024, revenue had fallen to $161.4 million. Over the first nine months of 2024 (Q1–Q3), losses exceeded $31 million. Masimo’s share price dropped more than 40%.
After activist investor Politan Capital forced out founder-CEO Joe Kiani, Masimo sold the entire audio portfolio to Samsung’s Harman in May 2025 for $350 million. That works out to roughly a 65% loss on the Sound United deal.
Why consolidation becomes the default outcome
This outcome wasn’t unique. Several of the same brands had already cycled through multiple owners, each promising renewal.
Brand recognition has largely held up. Turning that recognition into steady profits at premium price levels has been harder. In that context, consolidation becomes the more practical response.
Through Harman, Samsung now controls a broad group of audio brands, including JBL, Harman Kardon, AKG, Mark Levinson, Arcam, Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Roon, and others. Bose followed a similar path by acquiring the McIntosh Group in November 2024.
Bose followed a similar path by acquiring the McIntosh Group in November 2024. McIntosh faces many of the same pressures that complicated Masimo’s bet. Its amplifiers sell for $10,000 to more than $80,000 in a market where the core buyer base is aging and shrinking.
That doesn’t make the brand unviable, but it does make long-term independence harder to sustain.
When the Price Gap Closes
Changes in leadership or ownership haven’t reversed the decline because the pressure is ultimately technological.
DACs, amplifiers, and streamers from companies like Topping, SMSL, Benchmark, and Schiit now deliver high-end performance for a few hundred dollars.
In practical terms, “high-end” here often means the measurable noise and distortion are low enough to fall beneath what most listeners can reliably hear in normal use. Once gear clears that threshold, the remaining differences tend to shift away from raw fidelity and toward things like features, software, industrial design, service, and brand.
That change matters because luxury audio has long depended on a clear performance gap. When sonic differences were obvious, high prices felt easier to justify. And as those differences became harder for most listeners to detect, pricing leaned more heavily on design and storytelling rather than sound alone.
Buying habits reflect this shift as younger listeners seem comfortable using measurements and affordable gear to reach “good enough” sound. And based on forums, many are less willing to spend heavily on small or uncertain improvements.
Summit-fi pulled away from the middle
Meanwhile, prices at the very top have surged. Audiophiles now casually discuss $600,000–$750,000 loudspeakers and even $2 million systems as part of a “summit-fi” tier.
The result is a squeeze from both ends. It’s easier than ever to get good sound at low cost. The ultra-high end has moved into a price range only a small group of buyers can afford.
Linn Products shows how brands respond to that squeeze. In early 2023, Linn raised prices across its lineup. Its flagship Klimax DSM/3 streamer jumped £5,000 in a single increase in the UK, and now sells for roughly $39,000 to $48,230 in the US.
Even routine parts followed the same pattern, leading customers to question whether the brand is pricing its core audience out.
Raising prices can protect margins in the short term. It does little to grow the market. As technology closes the gap from below and fewer buyers are willing to pay luxury prices, even well-respected brands can lose customers long before they lose their reputation.
What Survival Looks Like Now
This moment doesn’t signal the end of high-end audio, but it does mark the end of the model that sustained it for decades. The industry was built on a scarcity of performance. That scarcity no longer exists in the same way.
As a result, independence is becoming harder to justify economically. Increasingly, survival means operating inside a larger corporate group, licensing technology, or shrinking into a niche that accepts lower volume and slower growth. Prestige still matters, but it no longer functions as a standalone business model.
The brands struggling today aren’t failing because they lost their identity or forgot how to make desirable products. They’re colliding with a market where “good enough” sound is cheap, true luxury is priced for very few, and the middle has thinned out.
A new class of audio brands isn’t taking over by replacing legacy names. It’s doing so by thriving in the space those names were never built to occupy.
It is true that the Hi Fi enthusiast is comprised of a very small segment of the overall buying market, as compared to say, the TV market where every house has one.
It is true that good sound is commonplace these days. Technology has branched out to no name products, and people take this for granted because they have no idea how unusual it was to find this kind of sound back in the 70s.
The true audiophile seems to be a dying breed and a limited aging group as mentioned in the article. Today, car stereos that can power a football stadium are a sort of competition amongst young people who aren’t truly interested in quality, but strive for their ability to rattle the windows and nerves of their neighbors.
I remember audio names like KLH, Acoustic Research, Advent, ADS, and others back in their day were well respected, but who would have thought that they would have gone belly up? It seems that Bose stuck in there for a long time through big marketing and advertising on the back of every magazine. They weren’t the best by any means. The Bose 901 speaker had a long run, for maybe 45 yrs, but I think most audiophile enthusiasts would agree that it wasn’t a truly good sounding speaker. Big marketing kept Bose alive in my opinion along with the Bose wave radio, but again, in my view they never made the best products. They were just better than average. It’s sad to see that some respected names have sold out to new ownership repeatedly. It seems to diminish the respect behind their name.
Totally agree with what you’ve said. I’m in my seventies and remember all the brands you discuss. I have a few neighbors who enjoy sound quality like I do and we all refer to Bose as : Blatently Overpriced Stereo Equipment.
Don’t forget “Klipsch” and “Infinity Reference Standard”. Oh, and I had a pair of AR9’s and loved them!
The cheap stuff isn’t getting better, just sterile computer noise.
The computer generation can’t tell the difference between MUSIC and rapp / hip hop or music and shredding.
If it sounds like a cheap computer, they will buy it and rave about it’s NON MUSICAL sterile clarity.
One development you missed was the trend you missed — for example, CH Precision’s deployment of Wattson Audio to expand its revenue base.
The issue is that fewer people are willing to tolerate subpar products, snake oil and dishonest claims from these so called high end brands, many of whose products are not significantly better than mass market products.
You read my mind.
This is exactly the issue I think. A lot of these brands have been degraded to just that. Brands. They aren’t performance oriented anymore and as such, don’t really perform and allowed clever engineering to close the gap at a fraction of the cost.
I think you only need to look at laptops like HP with speakers labeled B&O. If you ask me…that doesn’t make any sense. Laptop speakers are almost universally terrible and why any self respecting brand would allow someone’s potentially first exposure to their product be a pitiful laptop speaker just screams marketing deal to me because that’s what it is.
Pair that with speakers that look like they spent more effort looking like goofy set pieces than actually trying to sound the best they can be, and it’s little wonder they’re struggling because they’re banking on the fading market that still believes a product sounds better because the merchant said it would.
The fact of the matter is, you can build an amazing sound system that no one in their right mind would complain about for a couple thousand. And when you have near perfection barely breaking 10k spending $500,000+ begins to stop making sense. You’re probably chasing bragging rights at that point. Wanting to wow your other snake-oil buying friends that you have the better snake oil.
This is a well written article.
I don’t care how good those Phantom speakers sound, I’m not putting a giant noisy suppository in my living room
Very few people will pay a premium for a difference they cannot hear. Perhaps remaining customers are those seeking to buy the ears they once had in youth.
How about Dynaco, a sort of “poor man’s” Macintosh line of products, eg the SCA 80, an integrated amp, and even better pre-amps and power amps? How do they compare with modern high-end brands when it comes to distortion and natural sound?
As someone who has a recently renewed interest in high quality audio after being a teenage audiophile in the 90’s when hifi meant modular rack mount or stacked stereo systems and giant speakers….I have to say the availability of respectable hifi equipment is staggering. “Amplifier quality” is almost a non sequitur, your DAC and speakers are the fidelity choke points now and with a little research you can put together a system that will knock the socks off any audiophile without breaking even the most modest budgets.
Maybe it’s that even the rich aren’t that rich anymore, or the ones with money are aesthetically bankrupt .. while audio science has reached near perfection some time back and doing the required maths for a decent enclosure or cross over just isn’t that expensive..
Hi I am trying to find out information about the Epos ,ES14 ,prices, their website, reviews with no luck.can you Help.
It used to be possible to buy seriously high end gear worth the equivalent of 1 or 2 months wages.
The prices mentioned in this article are ludicrous and far beyond the average consumer, especially for younger generations who can barely get a foot on the housing ladder.
It’s really been like this for decades, a few hundred dollar unit gets like 99.9% the fidelity of the one costing 1000s, and the 0.1% difference is right on the edge or usually below the level of audibility.
Plus snakeoil… a lot of vendors play it straight. But some go into snake oil about jitter over ethernet or wifi or push snake oil cable tech that ‘aligns the electrons’ or whatever (instead of just saying they are well shielded, well constructed for superior audio quality). This turns off some people from the whole high end audio field.
I love music because music does every thing
Considering the fact that I run a YouTube channel, I am extremely impressed with how the HiFi industry is starting to shift. McIntosh is no longer the product that one aspired to owning. Long gone are the golden days of Mark Levinson and Krell which were amplifier brands that dominated for decades leaving zero room for other amplifier brands to penetrate the market.
Today – we see a plethora of brands offering product that has surpassed the aforementioned. Luxman wasn’t better than McIntosh back in the 1990s yet today, it has surpassed the iconic American brand.
That said – this same story reverberates itself in the television industry. Brands like Sony and their trinitron tvs along with Toshiba cinema series tv dominated the market in the 90s. Today the entire television industry is owned by- not even dominated- by LG and Samsung and a brand new brand; TCL.
The truth is this: Yesterday’s formula for success is as antiquated as getting in your car and driving to your local HiFi store today. Most audiophiles buy product based on reading and not by listening to it.
I am lucky to have been exposed to both eras in this hobby and thankful to have built a successful YouTube channel which couldn’t have been done in the 90s aka “the golden era” of HiFi.
This post is a bit of a ramble!
I am in my 70s and live in Wales. I’m in general agreement with the proposition that we audio enthusiasts are a ‘dying breed’. In my my teens in the 1960s, I caught the Hi-Fi bug, and I enjoyed learning about audio electronics. I built most of my equipment from magazine articles, and I had home-built Heathkit speakers. I also built a Heathkit sine/square-wave signal generator. I was living in Abergavenny, not far from Cardiff, and for several years running, I attended the annual Audio Festival and Fair held in a high class hotel in London. The knowledge I gained helped me to get a job in BBC Engineering. I worked in the BBC for 20 years, and qualified in their own internal engineering structure as well as earning qualifications more generally acknowledged by attending night school. I held several posts which included testing and developing high quality studio loudspeaker systems, and building sound desks for local radio stations. I also worked on Ampex VT machines and Studer multi track recorders. It was a very interesting and varied career until engineering department enclosures caught up with me, and I took a redundancy payout in 1989. I continued my interest in audio matters even though subsequent jobs had nothing to do with what I was doing in the BBC.
We have two adult children, and neither of them caught the Hi-Fi bug. All my wife wants is an on-off switch and a volume control. Her only interest in loudspeakers is that they have enough space on the top of them for supporting ornaments (grrr). I now feel like a voice crying in the wilderness. There is so much audio crapware around, such as tinny cellphones and mega bass car systems, that hardly anybody these days seems to be interested in faithful (non-processed) sound reproduction. Too much audio these days is ‘engineered’ using studios with half-a-mile wide desks and mega racks of outboards, or the equivalent in DAW software – yes, I’ve been there, but not really up my street. My personal love is ‘classical’ chamber music. The best recordings use a minimum number of microphones, barely more than a stereo pair. For many years, our old British company, Quad’s advertising motto was ‘For the closest approach to the original sound’. The founder of Quad, Peter Walker was a genius with audio, and his electrostatic speaker made you think that you weren’t listening to speakers. With the proliferation of ‘processed’ sound all around us now, I’m not so sure whether that motto is relevant so much these days.
As for Boze, they really were experts – in advertising.
I thought it also had to do with the listening habits of the recent generations. The popular music is so electronically altered that no one knows what anything sounds like “naturally”. Generations have grown up on constant compressed, artificial sound, so there are few that would know which was better between a 99.9% accurate reproduction and a 90% accurate one. Sure, maybe they can detect a difference, but which one is better? Less likely.
I think a lot of this is due to convenience of online music sources and the failure of Hifi to integrate without degrading usability, Arcam’s amp lineup for example reserves USB interface for its flagship model. I bought a Quad Vena II Play instead and very happy with it.
Hi.
Totally agree. As a long term audiophile since the 80’s, High End Retailer’s have shrunk, prices have skyrocketed and sound quality and technology have improved greatly.
I wouldn’t be able to afford what I have today if I started now. It really is unaffordable. So-called lower end sound is way improved as to be even more the norm today as are today’s listening habits more conducive to less investment. T V. tech is Way more proportional and affordable today.
My uncle owned a television and appliance store in NH! Every brand of TV he carried is now gone with one exception, Sony! Sony is spinning it’s TV business off to Chinese owned TCL! Brands My uncle use to carry RCA, ZENITH, SYLVANIA, MAGNAVOX,QUASAR,HITACHI ( unsure spelling) GE and TOSHIBA ( TOSHIBA is now probably under Chinese ownership) and is available at Best Buy!
Just like financial classes. The middle
class is dying. So it follows with mud and hifi.
Another issue that can separate companies from one another is customer service. I’ve recently had issues with Devialet first and second generation earbuds. Because of that experience, I am surely not willing to purchase any of the other large ticket items like the Phantom speaker.
Hifi is dead, in my family of six siblings and my partner family of four siblings that total some sixty adults, none are audiophiles except me, there is one couple who have a system that was selected for them by a major retail chain but they won’t change any of it in the pursuit of better sound.
All those below thirty listen to awfully cheep Bluetooth speakers playing back MP3 tracks or there phones is below the age of twenty that it makes my blood boil. I tried to flog my Marantz Ki 63 signature CD with the Marantz PM66 Ki signature amp and Monitor Audio Bronze 5 speakers, a really decent sounding setup at £300. some just laughed and said what is a CD why would I invest in old CDs when I can hear any music I want free on a phone or cheep Bluetooth speaker.
I suspect in the next five years Hifi company’s will have shrunk to a quarter of what it is now and all that talent will be gone, how sad is that.
A new class of audio brands isn’t taking over by replacing legacy names. It’s doing so by thriving in the space those names were never built to occupy.
Written by AI. Bless
This happened with car audio years ago. People went from purchasing cars with lousy stock radios that all but demanded an upgrade (Alpine) to leasing cars with “high end” Bose systems. You couldn’t mess with integrated all in one radios anymore so “hook up shops” all but disappeared. Remember Canal street in NYC? An entire line of business disappeared. Once the car is invented you can’t go back to riding a horse no matter how gorgeous. History repeats.