JBL under HK's new management of Paliwal has essentially abandoned high end and even middle end speakers, and JBL Professional is not making enough profits to be a growth part of the company anymore. Paliwal decided that for the company to be better, and growth oriented, it had to become much more international in scope, product, markets, and personnel. So he's basically sent all of JBL manufacturing to Mexico and Japan, proudly shutting down JBL's Northridge production (leaving only some of JBL Pro there), and over the last two years, fired / let go of the majority of JBL's experienced engineers, including Greg Timbers and Jerry Moro - primarily so that design can go over to Non-US sources and designers. While its true that Harman has done better by concentrating on auto / mobile, and interconnected software (to become a "growth" company), the legacy companies like JBL, Crown, and the like under Harman will essentially wither away or be spun off IF someone wants to continue them - IMO.
IMO, Once Samsung gets what they want out of this merger, and Paliwal rides off to another company to resurrect (his expertise) within 2 years, JBL could either die or go independent.
The status quo has already been the decline of JBL as they essentially no longer make anything here in the us, but rather slap the JBL logo on Far East produced crap aimed at the convenience audio market - profitable, but hardly the stuff of future legends. But then again, the audio market is so much different from even a decade ago what with mobile this, portable that, bluetooth and internet connectivity, etc. So yes, the old JBL is already dead, and the new JBL will be vastly different, shifting already.
The classic way most companies die, they get all the IP and legacy goodwill out of them, only to have their name slapped around on all sorts of easily sourced Chinese cheap goods, then wither away.
JBL can and has produced plenty of fine and great sounding speakers for the US, Japanese, and European markets for the past 20 years - but the market for large and even medium sized speakers has dried up in the US - people want fundamentally different audio reproducers brought on by the desire to have inconspicuous speakers, non-wired speakers, and speakers that are secondary to fidelity, power, and scale, but rather the suggestion of sound and quality, the suggestion of location, surround, and multichannel, and the need for none of it to be seen if possible - the Bose model of sound reproduction. If all that people nowadays listen to is earbuds and soundbars, is it any wonder that traditional speaker designs are not being bought?