Meet the Team

With Meet The HARMAN Luxury Team, our goal is for you to get to know us better. In each edition we feature a different member of the team, and this month it's Dan Emery, Principal Electronics Engineer.

How would you describe what you do in your current role?

I translate ideas of what a product needs to do or be into reality. This involves simulation, prototyping, testing, drawing, reviewing, reworking, listening (the most important of tests), among others. It’s great fun.

What did you study in school? Did you always imagine yourself doing something like what you’re doing now or did the fates just take you in that direction?

I studied Electronics Engineering for my degree, choosing modules that I believed were the most useful for designing audio equipment. When I was around 17 years old, I knew I wanted to design Hi-Fi equipment and have loved doing so since I started.

How did your career path lead you to HARMAN?

At the age of 16, I was working in a shop that sold all sorts of things, including some separates from the likes of Sony, Kenwood, Technics and Pioneer. My interest in building systems started there and I was studying Electronics at the time, it clicked that I could turn it into a job and design the boards.  A few years later, after graduating from my degree I wrote to as many Hi-Fi companies as I could find addresses for in the UK asking for a job.  It happened that Linn Products were hiring, and I landed my first proper job with them as a graduate electronics engineer.  14 years later I moved to join the team at Naim Audio where I worked for six years and am now joining some of the old Naim team again, here at HARMAN.

What is the most important thing you have learned over your career?

That every single design decision has the potential to alter the audio performance of a product for better or worse, nothing should be assumed to be inert until proven.

Any other advice you would share with people just starting out in this industry?

If they are starting in engineering, measurements are important – but, they will only tell you that you have a problem that needs investigation or that there does not look to be any major issues (once you have enough areas covered). I have not yet found a single measurement that will tell you that a design will sound great, plenty that will tell you it will sound bad, and plenty that will tell you it probably won’t sound bad, but not the measurement that tells you it will sound great. Only ears have done that so far.

What are you most proud of in your life?

I’m most proud of my incredible wife, who has spent the last seven years training as a Psychotherapist and building up her own private practice.

When did you realize you had a passion for music or audio? Was there any one band, song, or movie that did it for you?

Music has been around me since before I can remember. The first memory I have of music was requesting that my dad play the album Imagine by John Lennon, I think he got fed up of it, and bought me a cassette of it along with a Walkman so I could listen to it as much as I wanted to. When I first got it, It took me days to get past the title track as I kept rewinding it. To this very day I still love that album. The imagery that the lyrics conjure up are both personal memories and what the songs are portraying at the same time. 

What current technology impresses you the most?

It’s a very simple technology really, at least on the surface, but it has to be acoustic transducers. When you break it down it is a piece of material being wobbled about -- and remarkably, that can sound like a violin virtuoso playing a solo in a concert hall, or a typewriter in a movie scene, or any of the sounds used in EDM, it’s incredible from what could be a piece of shaped paper being moved back and forth.

Favorite music genre?

Ooooh, that’s a tough one, a really tough one. It depends on my mood a lot, and whether I’m looking to listen to the music or have it on in the background. Over the years I have broadened my horizons to include most genres.

If I’m actively listening to the music, it just needs to be something I don’t find offensive, there are a few artists I dislike, and a few styles I dislike, but there’s something to be enjoyed in most music. A lot of my favourite tunes are guitar based though.

If I’m looking to focus on a task or for some motivation while exercising something with a driving beat and little by way of lyrics is great, so a bit of Drum and Bass fits that quite nicely.

The desert island question, of course. If you were marooned for eternity & could listen to only 3 albums, what would they be?

• John Lennon – Imagine
• Foo Fighters – Color and the Shape
• A Classical music compilation – to cover a lot of bases           

You have the floor. In closing, tell us anything else you want us to know about yourself.

I have been learning Spanish as a hobby over the last few years. My wife and I love taking trips to Spain when we get the chance.  I’d consider myself to be able to just about get by as a tourist without using too much English now.