SYDNEY LOUDSPEAKER MAFIA.......

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Ενα πολύ ενδιαφέρον αφιέρωμα-συνέντευξη στον κορυφαίο

επιστήμονα και μηχανικό που άλλαξε τον τρόπο που

σχεδιάζονται και υλοποιούνται όλα σχεδόν τα σύγχρονα

ηχεία!

 

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Albert Neville Thiele was born December 4, 1920, in Brisbane, Queensland,
and educated at Milton State School, Brisbane Grammar School, and the

Universities of Queensland and Sydney. After performing on Brisbane radio

stations (as a boy soprano in the early ’30s), and later as an actor, he

became intensely interested in the reproduction and transmission of sound.

After five years of war service in infantry and in the Australian corps of

Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, he graduated with a Bachelor of

Engineering (Mechanical and Electrical) in 1952.

 

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Joining E.M.I. (Australia) Ltd. in 1952, he was employed as a design engineer

on special projects, including telemetry. With the start of television in

Australia, he spent six months of 1955 in the laboratories of EMI at Hayes,

Middlesex, and associated companies in Scandinavia and the United

States,and on return to Australia he led the design team that developed

EMI’s earliest Australian television receivers. Appointed Advanced

Development

Engineer in 1957, he was responsible for applying advanced technology in

EMI Australia’s radio and television receivers and electronic test equipment.

 

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Joining the Australian Broadcasting Commission (subsequently Corporation) in

1962, he was engaged as Senior Engineer, Design and Development, in

designing and assessing equipment and systems for sound and television

broadcasting. After acting as Director of Engineering ACT, responsible for

engineering of the ABC’s radio and television studios in Canberra, he was in

1978 appointed Assistant Director Engineering NSW (TV), responsible for

engineering of the ABC’s Gore Hill television studios in Sydney.

 

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In 1980 he was appointed Director, Engineering Development and New

Systems Applications, where he was responsible for the ABC’s engineering

research and development until his retirement at the end of 1985. In 1991,

he became Honorary Visiting Fellow in the University of New South Wales,

and since 1994 Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he

teaches loudspeaker design in its Graduate Audio Program. He is currently

a consulting engineer in the fields of Audio, Radio, Television, and Electronic

Filter Design.

 

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He has published thirty-eight papers on electroacoustics, network

theory, testing methods, and sound and vision broadcasting in Electronic

Engineering (UK), Proc IREE (Aust) (later JEEEA), JAES, and has spoken at

conventions of IREE (Aust), AES, IEE, and IEEE. Some of his papers,

notably on loudspeakers, television testing, and coaxial cable

equalization, have become accepted internationally as references on these

topics,

including origination of the Thiele-Small parameters for

measuring and designing loudspeakers.

 

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In 1968 and in 1992 he was awarded the Norman W.V. Hayes Medal of the

Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers Australia for best papers

published during those years in the Institution’s Proceedings, and in 1996

he received its Award of Honor. In 1976 he was invited by the Audio

Engineering

Society (AES) to lecture, with Dr. Richard H. Small, on loudspeaker design

in a seminar at the University of Colorado, a convention of the Institute of

Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in Philadelphia and meetings of

the AES throughout the United States. In 1994 he was awarded the

Society’s Silver Medal “for pioneering work in loudspeaker simulation.”

 

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers named him

co-recipient, with Dr. Richard H. Small, of its 2003 Masaru Ibuka Consumer

Electronics Award “for major contributions to the synthesis and analysis of

loudspeakers.”



He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the 2003

Queen’s Birthday honors “for service to audio engineering, particularly in

the field of loudspeaker design and the development of audio engineering

standards.”



From 1969 to 1974 he was involved in standards for broadcasting, as a

member of five of the seven committees advising the Australian

Broadcasting Control Board on standards for the introduction of Australia’s

color television service and Chairman of the Working Party on the Standard

Demodulator.



Neville Thiele has worked on international standards for sound and television

broadcasting with the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) of

the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva, where he

represented Australia at four meetings in 1980, 1981, 1983, and 1985, and

was an active member of CCIR Interim Working Parties on International

Exchange of Sound Programmes, Subjective Testing of Television Picture

Quality, and High Definition Television.

 

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At the 1985 meeting, he was appointed Chairman of CCIR Sub Working Group

CMTT-C-1 on Long Distance Transmission of Analogue Sound. He is

currently

an active member of the Australian National Study Group 6, on Sound and

Television Broadcasting, of the ITU’s Radio Communications Bureau, which

has succeeded the CCIR.


He has also been involved in standards for electroacoustics, nationally on

committees of Standards Australia (SA), where he was Chairman of its

Committee TE/8, Sound and Television Engineering and Recording and is at

present a member of its committee IT 29, Information Technology, on

digital compression of video and audio, and internationally in committees of

the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and of the Audio

Engineering Society, concerned with Loudspeakers and Digital Audio.

 

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Thiele is a Member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television

Engineers

and a Vice President of the Australian Sound Recordings Association. He is

a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia and of the Audio

Engineering Society, of which he has been Vice President, International

Region from 1991 to 1993 and from 2001 to the present. He was President

of the Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers Australia from 1986 to

1988.




His other interests are bushwalking, music, and theatre, and he recently

narrated the soundtrack of Bruce Petty’s well-received film, “The Mad

Century 1900-2000” for SBS Independent.

 

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Steve Mowry: When I searched the Internet on “Neville Thiele” with Google and Yahoo, I got 10,700 and 10,900 hits, respectively. Did you ever think that you would become legendary within the audio industry?


Neville Thiele: No, I certainly never, even vaguely. People

are very kind to say so. The one thing I did hope was that the industry would pick up the Parameters after I had done them. It seemed to me, so obviously a way to specify a driver nicely. But there hadn’t been a glimmer of interest in the Parameters apart from my personal friends in the lab at EMI. EMI’s management had rejected the Parameters as being an academic exercise with no practical interest. I published my paper in August 1961, left EMI in December of 1961, and went to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and focused much more on television from then on.


It wasn’t until Dick Small came to the University of Sydney in 1964 and expressed an interest in loudspeakers. One of the lecturers there, Bob Frater, told Dick that there had been quite an interesting paper published recently here and you, Dick Small, might want to read that paper.
So one night, after I had given a lecture as Chairman of the Sydney Division of the Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers, up came two nice people, Dick Small and the lady later to become his wife, Jane. They introduced themselves and we started talking about loudspeakers.


Dick soon afterwards started a Ph.D. at University of Sydney and became friends with Ernest Benson1. Then Dick wrote his series of publications, which you know about, for the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, in 1972 and 1973, and had persuaded the Journal to reprint my 1961 paper in May and June of 1971. It was only then that people became interested in the Parameters. As far as I knew, Ray Newman and Don Keele at Electro-Voice were the first to use them. But a long time afterwards Laurie Fincham at KEF told me that he had obtained a copy of my Australian paper in 1964 but thought it too valuable to let anyone else know.


Even in the seventies it still seemed that the parameters would not become generally known as a useful device. It wasn’t until about 1980 that you could say just about everybody was using the parameters and realizing that they were a handy way to design loudspeakers. About my getting personal recognition, that has always been a surprise to me. I am just an engineer with a bit of an obsession with quality. That can be quite painful at times.

 

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SM: What do you consider to be your greatest achievement in your career as an audio engineer?


NT: The Parameters, and through them my friendship with Ern Benson and Dick Small. It was more than just an engineering collaboration. We all became very good friends and so were our wives. I used to refer to us as the Sydney Loudspeaker Mafia.


I think I was the first person to describe all-pass crossovers. If you put complementary high-pass and low-pass odd order Butterworths together in a crossover, you got a flat response, but except for a first order crossover it can only be all pass. That was published in Australia in 1975. I described the second order Linkwitz-Riley crossover there too, but dismissed it as not very useful! But that was only published in Australia and all-pass crossovers only became well known generally when Peter Garde published his paper on them in the AES Journal in 1980.

 

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SM: How long have you been in the industry?

NT: I have been in the broadcasting industry for seventy years. At the age of 12, my brother and I were boy sopranos singing on Brisbane radio. That motivated both of us to a passion for broadcasting. Actually my brother, who passed away ten years ago, became one of Australia’s best-known actors.

 

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SM: How did you begin your engineering career?


NT: I graduated from the University of Sydney in May 1952 and started work at EMI Australia in their Special Products lab. I thought that this was really good luck and that I would be working on recording. It wasn’t; it was weaponry. We had a contract for telemetry for Australia’s rocket range at Woomera. The little rockets went up for two minutes and came down in two minutes.

They had sensors for pitch and yaw and other flight data and we measured their speed and range by Doppler. A signal was sent up from the ground at 108MHz, frequency doubled in the rocket to 216MHz, modulated with the data, and sent back to the ground. This was cutting edge electronics. Its pulse signals needed an understanding of transient response and my University course had not covered the Laplace transform. So I had to learn it to handle the rocketry.

 

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SM: Shame on you, ha ha.


NT: During this time EMI had two positions to fill and they asked me if I would like to be a loudspeaker or a television engineer. I told them I would prefer loudspeakers. They replied that they would like me to do television and by the way, if I did, there was a six months secondment to the EMI lab in London. So I became a television engineer.
I was responsible for making EMI’s first Australian television receiver that had a 17˝ tube—quite big for that time.

 

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SM: Was it round?

NT: Oh no, that was the earlier 12˝.


SM: Was your 1961 paper on the parameters your first?


NT: My first paper was published January–February 1956 on active filters in the English journal, Electronic Engineering. I did the work on this in 1953. When I first submitted the paper in 1954, I received a letter that seemed to indicate that the paper had been rejected. In 1955 I was sent to England by EMI to study television receiver design. While I was there, I visited EMI’s Abbey Road studios and also decided to look up the editor of the Electronic Engineering journal. He remembered me and wondered why I had not returned the paper. Checking again, they found the reviewer had been pretty scathing but thought that it could be worthwhile after a lot of re-writing.


So I rewrote the paper while I was in England, a kind lady in the EMI lab in London typed it for me, and it was published in two parts in January and February 1956 as “The Design of Filters Using only RC Sections and Gain Stages.” It was one of the earliest papers on active filters and I was rather proud of it, but in the end it was overshadowed by Sallen and Key’s much more practical configuration.

 

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SM: Could you describe your course within the Graduate School of the University of Sydney?


NT: It is a 26-hour course, which is not as long as I would like to cover the whole subject. It counts for credit towards a Masters by examination. We cover fundamentals of drivers, acoustical/electrical equivalents, the loudspeaker as a high-pass filter, the parameters and how to measure them, box design, crossovers, cables (!), the relationship of the loudspeaker with the room, and subjective listening tests.

 

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SM: How do you envision the role of the AES with regards to the audio industry in the future? With the Internet providing an alternative platform to the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, has the AES considered the possibility of potential loss of technical contributors such as new and/or independent audio engineers publishing technical papers on their own websites?


NT: I prefer to get my information from a more reliable source. I find the Internet helpful, but so much nonsense is published there. The AES offers its Journal to members online for a reduced membership fee as an alternative to the printed version. The source of AES papers generally is presentations at conventions. But more recently the Journal has added tutorial papers of wider general interest.

 

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SM: What do you consider to be the most important characteristics of a loudspeaker system?


NT: Flatness of response, low distortion, and, through my conversations with BBC Research, balance. If they cannot reproduce the bottom end they don’t try to reproduce the very top end. The Radio Designer’s Handbook stated 50 years ago that the product of the top and bottom cutoff frequencies should be 500,000; for example, 50Hz and 10,000Hz or 25Hz and 20,000Hz.

 

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SM: What impact do you think the migration of the loudspeaker industry to the People’s Republic of China will have on the future of loudspeaker technology?


NT: Some of their products are good and some not so good; however, they appear to be improving. I have a friend who purchases loudspeakers from China and modifies them. The enclosures are beautifully made.