Interesting Merger

[leonski]

www.audioholics.com/news/sound-united-acquires-d-m-group-denon-marantz-boston

Sound United now consists of Denon, Marantz, DefTech, Polk, Boston Acoustics and others.


I don't this this is as nice a bunch as the Harman Group, which lets the member companies still have quite a bit of autonomy.
That would be Mark Levinson, Infinity, JBL and several others.   

[Deleted]

I wonder how Sound United feels now that they've got to come up with the money for a HEOS lawsuit settlement. Sonos is a bit too patent-happy and lawsuit-happy for my liking (what, they don't think they can survive without throwing up a bunch of barriers to entry for competitors?), but it's their right as a company and D+M Group somehow didn't think they'd get wrapped up in it, which seemed foolish to me.

The rest of the industry decided to just adopt DTS Play-Fi (which works well enough) and stay out of the whole thing between Sonos and D+M.

[vcautokid]

Yeah agreed. You got to know where your millions will do the most good. Anyone who thinks standards and patents and copyright are trivial, obviously has not been in the audio video business. It happens in allot of other industries too.

[leonski]

A patent is ONLY as good as its last defense in court.

IOW?

A patent which is not defended is worthless.

I worked for a company which Vigorously defended its intellectual property. And I mean in lawsuits worth millions and litigated over several years time.
This was in a High-Tech industry of semiconductor manufacture.