Dealer Profile

527 Madison Ave.
New York, New York 10022

At the Harman Luxury Audio Group, we consider ourselves fortunate to work with the best dealer partners in the consumer audio industry. Moreover, we strive to provide the best possible audio experience to a consumer that knows what pristine sound reproduction represents. This month, we sat down with Jamie Feuss, Harman Director of Retail, to chat about the Harman Store in New York and the role it plays in delivering the Luxury Audio experience to consumers and more.

Tell us about your team.

Andre Taylor is the Store Manager. Ed Struzziero is one of two Assistant Managers.  His focus and passion are “all things luxury hi-end.”  He worked for years as a Factory Rep for many brands in New England as well as directly with customers as I did for the former Boston-based chain Tweeter Home Entertainment.  Justin Marino is our second Assistant Manager.  Our entire team (five more Audio Consultants) has been to Northridge and graduated from our Harman Luxury Academy trainings.  They can talk about and demonstrate all of our portable audio, head-phone, sound-bars and smart-audio products as well as provide great speaker demos in our downstairs Luxury Audio Space. 

My role as Director of Retail for Harman is to keep helping the team with the latest demo tools and store infrastructure, provide training around the brands and products.  I also get to collaborate and figure out how to demo and display our products and how to design our stores! I am lucky as I love music and have found a group of people who are also into music and movies.  We push each other to learn more about our products and the competition, and can share that knowledge and passion with people who visit.

Specific to Luxury Audio, what are your mission and vision at the store?

We want to expose people to better sound.  We Love to provide Wow moments with the Store Synthesis Theater and the JBL Everest and Synthesis Speaker line.  Our mission is to inform visitors of who Sidney Harman was and relate the brand stories of JBL, Mark Levinson, Revel, Lexicon and Arcam.

We can provide store tours for dealers and their clients, and show off some of our key Professional brands as well.  We have hosted trainings, events, music performances, new product roll-outs and periodically show luxury vehicles in store with our branded audio.  It’s fun to point out to people that they could drive to a concert listening to our stuff, get to the concert and hear our stuff from artists who often use our products in recording studios and then get back home to listen to music with our products.  It’s an eco-system we can show in the store.

What does Luxury Audio mean to you?

It really just means better!  Sound is life-like, the performers are there in the room and you hear it all – vocals, instruments and all the Bass!  The experience of listening still gives me goosebumps.   Clearly, it also means build quality and longevity, and today with all of our more modern tools and research of measuring sound, luxury means this R&D and build quality are second to none.

What do you want people to know about the Harman Store?

That it’s a fantastic place to experience Luxury Audio. Besides the Synthesis Theater Space where we demo our best surround processor (JBL SDP-75), we also have an acoustically treated stereo sound-room with the Revel Performa Beryllium series and Mark Levinson products for comparative listening.  

We love to play our Revel Salon2’s to people off the street and show them through a few short demos how truly amazing stereo sound can be with the right equipment.  The contrast between listening through headphones and a smart phone with blue-tooth is stark, and we try to explain it all with as little jargon as possible. In addition we show the JBL Everest’s on the ground floor where everyone can see and hear them when they walk into the store.  We also have the JBL K2 speakers with automotive grade Ferrari-Red finish set-up in the lower level.  We can stream hi-res audio to all of our speakers to provide not only great sound but maximum choice for people to hear their favorite music like they never have before. Taylor Swift on the Everests sounds fantastic!

Any final thoughts or things you want our readers to know about the store?

Yes! As part of an ongoing commitment to improve our guest experiences, we are going to be renovating the Harman Store this year. If you’re looking for a demo or just to pay us a visit, call the store number at (212) 822-2777 and ask for me, Andre or Ed. We want to make sure your visit isn’t impacted by the renovations.

Also, we want to reiterate, at the store we work WITH our Harman dealer partners, not in competition with them. We don’t ship or install abroad. This means that when we meet people from around the country and around the world who want our stuff, we look for dealers in their area to introduce them to.

Thanks to Jamie for taking the time to tell us more about the Harman Store and what is truly a great visitor experience. Continue to watch this space each month for more profiles on our Luxury Audio dealer partners.