Henry Kloss (1929, Altoona, PA–January 31, 2002, Cambridge, MA) was a prominent audio engineer who helped advance hi-fi loudspeaker and radio receiver technology beginning in the 1950s until the time of his death. Kloss was responsible for a number of "firsts", including the acoustic suspension loudspeaker and the high fidelity cassette deck. He founded several companies, and last lent his name to the Model One and Model Two radios from Tivoli Audio . 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 the first projection television system, the Advent Video Beam 1000 .
Career
Kloss (rhymes with gross) was a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who 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. Up until that time, speakers of any reasonable quality had to be quite large in size. By using an enclosure with a sealed air cavity behind the speaker cone acting as a spring to damp woofer motion, they were able to make "bookshelf size", less expensive speakers. Although the speaker was inefficient in power consumption compared to ported designs, it had extremely low distortion. The AR 1 was the first commercial acoustic suspension loudspeaker.
Kloss began his custom of eponymous products by lending his last name's initial to KLH as a founder in 1957, along with Malcolm Lowe and J. Anton Hoffman who had also been investors in AR. There Kloss continued to build speakers such as the classic KLH Model 6 and produced one of the first small FM radios with high selectivity, the Model 8 . He also created the first solid state record player, the Model 11 . In 1968, he talked with Ray Dolby of Dolby Laboratories and convinced him to develop the B version of Dolby noise reduction to reduce tape hiss. This resulted in the KLH Model 40 reel-to-reel tape recorder, Dolby's first foray into a consumer product.
Kloss had founded Advent in 1967. The name came from the legal placeholder 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 1969 he had quit KLH to build a remarkable dual driver speaker with 10 inch woofer called simply the Advent Loudspeaker (later renamed the Larger Advent). It rivaled the sound of the then top-line AR Model 3A (which used three drivers and a 12 inch woofer), but only cost about one third as much. He then went to work on increasing the fidelity of cassette tapes, a format that had originally only been meant to be used for dictation. Kloss introduced the Advent 201 in 1971, incorporating Dolby B along with chromium dioxide tape to create the first 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.
Cambridge SoundWorks was founded in 1988. That company was quite successful, producing dozens of different models ranging from the ever-present table radio of Kloss's companies to high quality speaker systems for computers. It is now a subsidiary of Creative Technology.
Kloss briefly went into retirement in the late 1990s, but soon found himself co-founding another company, Tivoli Audio. There, he made the Model One (mono) and Model Two (stereo) table radios using MESFET technology to increase selectivity. The high-quality tuner combined with a good speaker arrangement led some reviewers to call these radios "Bose killers." However, the Cambridge SoundWorks Model 88 had used some similar technology, leading to a lawsuit between Cambridge and Tivoli Audio.
Kloss continued to work on other projects, but died in 2002 of a subdural hematoma.
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Last updated: 05-27-2005 03:00:53
