Henry Kloss (1929, Altoona, PA
–January 31, 2002, Cambridge, MA
) was a prominent audio engineer and businessman who helped
advance high fidelity loudspeaker and radio
receiver technology beginning in
the 1950s. Kloss (pronounced with a long o, like
"close") was a student in physics at
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
(class of 1953), but never received a
degree. He was responsible for a number of innovations,
including the
acoustic suspension
loudspeaker and the high fidelity
cassette deck. In 2000, Kloss was one of the
first inductees into the
Consumer Electronics
Association's Hall of Fame. He earned an
Emmy Award for his development of a
projection television system, the
Advent Video Beam 1000.
Career
During the course of his career, Kloss founded or co-founded
several significant audio equipment manufacturing companies.
Acoustic Research
He co-founded
Acoustic Research
Corporation (AR) with
Edgar
Villchur in 1954. Villchur, a former teacher of Kloss, had
conceived a novel way of building an accurate loudspeaker. Together
they developed the AR Model 1, which changed the way that speakers
were designed. Until then, speakers of quality had to be quite
large. By using an enclosure with a sealed air cavity behind the
speaker cone which acted as a
spring
to damp
woofer motion, they were able to make
less-expensive,
bookshelf-size
speakers. Although they were inefficient in power consumption
compared to ported designs, they had extremely low distortion. The
AR-1 was the first commercial acoustic suspension
loudspeaker.
KLH
A KLH Model Eight FM table radio.
Kloss began his custom of
eponymous products
by lending his last name's initial to
KLH as a founder in 1957, along with Malcolm
Low and J. Anton Hofmann (son of pianist
Józef Hofmann) who had also been
investors in AR. At Cambridge-based KLH, Kloss continued to build
speakers such as the classic KLH Model Five and Six, and produced
one of the first small
FM radios with high
selectivity, the Model Eight.
Though KLH was sold to the Singer Corporation in 1964, Kloss
remained at the firm for a short time to assist in the development
of additional speakers and electronic music products, and the firm
continued to attract design and engineering talent. Kloss created
the first
solid state
record player, the KLH Model Eleven.
In 1962, he collaborated with
Ray Dolby of
Dolby Laboratories to develop the
B version of the
Dolby
noise reduction system to reduce tape hiss. This resulted in
the KLH Model Forty reel-to-reel tape recorder, Dolby's first foray
into the consumer product market. By 1967, Kloss had left KLH. KLH
was eventually sold to
Kyocera, and
production was shifted overseas. By 1979, nearly all of the
original design and engineering team had left the company.
Advent Corporation
An Advent Dolby noise reduction unit.
Kloss founded
Advent Corporation in 1967. The name
came from the legal description
the advent corporation
("advent" means
approaching in
Latin)
used in the
incorporation
documents before the actual name is selected. The original goal had
been to develop a projection television, but by 1968 he had quit
KLH to build a remarkable dual driver speaker
system with 10 inch (25 cm) woofer called simply
The
Advent Loudspeaker (later colloquially called the
Large
Advent after introduction of
The Smaller Advent
Loudspeaker). It rivaled the sound of the then top-line AR
Model 3a (which used three drivers and a 12 inch (30 cm) woofer),
but only cost about half as much. He then went to work on
increasing the fidelity of
cassette
tapes, a format that had originally been meant to be used only
for
dictation. Kloss introduced the Advent
201 in 1971, incorporating Dolby B along with
chromium dioxide tape in the first
popular high fidelity
cassette
deck.
The Advent Video Beam 1000 was finally released in 1972, the first
large screen projection television for home use. This led to
founding
Kloss Video Corporation in 1977. He
invented the
Novatron tube there, which
increased the efficiency of projection TVs.
Eventually, long after Kloss’ departure, Advent ran into hard times
and never emerged from a bankruptcy declared in March 1981. Kloss’
own Video Corporation passed on reacquiring the New Hampshire based
brand, which was later merged into International Jensen.
Cambridge SoundWorks
Cambridge SoundWorks was
founded in 1988. That company was quite successful, producing
dozens of different models including the first speakers with
{satellite} mid/tweeter separated from the woofer (originally dual
passive, PRE-powered pre-SUB-woofer, therefore required a lot of
power to make them really thump} and the ever-present
table radio of Kloss's companies to high quality
speaker systems for
computers. Kloss left
Cambridge SoundWorks in 1996. The company is now a subsidiary of
Creative Technology.
Tivoli Audio
Kloss briefly went into retirement, but soon found himself
co-founding another company,
Tivoli
Audio, with long-time associate and former
Cambridge SoundWorks co-founder
Tom DeVesto. There, he made the Model
One (
mono) and Model Two (
stereo) table radios using
MOSFET technology to increase selectivity; they have
elements similar in appearance to his legendary KLH Model Eight
radio mentioned earlier. The high-quality
tuner combined with a good speaker arrangement
led some reviewers to call these modern radios "
Bose killers." However, the Cambridge
SoundWorks Model 88 had used some similar technology, leading to a
lawsuit between Cambridge and Tivoli Audio.
References
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