Edgar Marion Villchur was an American inventor, educator, and writer widely known for his 1954 invention of the
acoustic suspension loudspeaker which revolutionized the field of high-fidelity equipment. A speaker Villchur developed, the AR-3, is exhibited at the
The Smithsonian Institution’s Information Age Exhibit in
Washington, DC.
Villchur's speaker systems provided improved bass response while reducing the speaker's cabinet size.
Acoustic Research, Inc. (AR), of which he was president from 1954 to 1967, manufactured high-fidelity loudspeakers,
turntables,
and other stereo components of his design, and demonstrated their
quality through “live vs. recorded” concerts. The company’s market share
grew to 32 percent by 1966. After leaving AR, Villchur researched
hearing aid technology, developing the multichannel compression hearing aid, which became the industry standard for hearing aids.
(28 May 1917 – 17 October 2011)
Education, World War II, and early careers
Edgar Villchur received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in art history from
City College
in New York City. He worked in the theater, and had plans to be a
scenic designer. World War II changed those plans, and he was trained by
the
US Army in maintenance and repair of radios, radar, and other equipment. He was stationed in
New Guinea, where he rose to the rank of captain and was in charge of the electronic equipment for his squadron.
After the war, Villchur opened a shop in New York’s
Greenwich Village
where he repaired radios and built custom home high fidelity sets. He
continued to educate himself in the area of audio engineering, taking
courses in mathematics and engineering at
New York University. After submitting an article to
Audio Engineering magazine (later renamed Audio), he was asked to write a regular column.
Despite the fact that his Masters Degree was in Art History, Villchur
applied for a teaching job at NYU in the mid-fifties, presenting the
administration with an outline of a course in Reproduction of Sound. His
proposal was accepted, and he taught that course at night for several
years. This was the first time such a course had been offered anywhere.
At the same time, he worked at the
American Foundation for the Blind in
Manhattan,
organizing their laboratory and designing or redesigning devices to
make it easier for blind people to live independently. The tone arm on
the turntable made by the Foundation had 12% distortion. Villchur
redesigned it so that the distortion was less than 4%.
One of his inventions for the Foundation for the Blind was a
turntable
tone arm that descended slowly to the surface of a vinyl record. This
prevented the possibility that a blind person might drop the arm
accidentally and that the sudden fall might damage the stylus or the
record. In later years, when he was designing the AR turntable, he added
this same feature to the tone arm. In the ads describing the advantages
of the product, the photo showed a person accidentally dropping the
tone arm, with a caption noting that this turntable was “For
butterfingers.”
Invention of the acoustic-suspension loudspeaker
Villchur recognized that the weak link in home equipment was the
loudspeaker.
Amplifiers, record players, tape players, and tuners were fairly
faithful to the original sound, but speakers of the time were unable to
reproduce the bass notes of records or tapes without distortion. He came
up with the idea for a new form of audio loudspeaker, one that would
greatly reduce distortion by replacing the nonlinear mechanical spring
with a linear air cushion. This “acoustic suspension” design
demonstrated a greater undistorted SPL (sound pressure level) at 25 Hz
than any previous loudspeaker type, including bass reflex, infinite
baffle, or large horn designs.
He built a prototype of his new speaker out of a plywood box. The
dimensions of the face of the box were taken from a picture frame that
Villchur had hanging in his house. His wife Rosemary, who had been a
draftswoman during the war, sewed the pattern for the flexible surround
out of mattress ticking. Unable to afford the full services of a
patent attorney,
he found a patent lawyer who was willing to explain the patent process
briefly, and Villchur applied for a patent himself. In 1956, he received
U.S. Patent 2,775,309
for the acoustic-suspension loudspeaker. He tried to sell the idea to
several loudspeaker manufacturers, but his idea was rejected as
impossible.
Acoustic Research, Inc.
One of his students at NYU,
Henry Kloss,
listened to Villchur’s explanation of acoustic suspension and agreed
that a speaker built on this principle would be a major improvement in
hi-fi
sound reproduction.
Villchur decided that since the established manufacturers were not
interested in the invention, the only way to make it available to the
public was to go into business producing the new speaker. Kloss had a
loft in
Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was making loudspeaker cabinets, and the two men became business partners in
Acoustic Research, Inc. (AR) in 1954. The partnership lasted until 1957, when Kloss left to form
KLH, manufacturing loudspeakers using Villchur’s acoustic suspension principle, under license from AR.
Over the next two decades, almost all major loudspeaker manufacturers
gradually changed from mechanical to acoustic suspension. At first they
did so under license to AR, paying
royalties to use the principles of Villchur’s patent. When the
Electro-Voice Company
refused to pay the royalties, AR sued them for patent infringement.
Electro-Voice countersued, claiming prior art in the form of a mention
of an air spring in a different system. The ensuing lawsuit resulted in
the loss of the patent for Acoustic Research, a decision which Villchur
chose not to appeal. In an interview about the case, Villchur says that
he knew the judge’s decision to void the patent was incorrect, but that
he felt he had better things to do than to spend his life in litigation.
He cited the example of
Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of
FM radio, whose patent was rendered unprofitable through the actions of
RCA.
Armstrong spent years unsuccessfully fighting that injustice, and
eventually committed suicide. Villchur decided not to contest the loss
of his loudspeaker patent, but rather to move on and continue improving
the quality of high fidelity equipment.
The first acoustic-suspension loudspeaker, the AR-1, was introduced
at the New York Audio Show in 1954, and was an instant success. Villchur
continued to improve loudspeakers, coming out with new models roughly
every two years. The AR-2, produced in 1956, was a no-frills version of
the speaker at a lower price. The independent testing agency
Consumers Union, publisher of
Consumer Reports magazine,
did a report on loudspeakers that year. The AR-2 was one of only four
speakers that received the Check Rating for highest quality, regardless
of price. Of the four speakers that received the check rating, two were
made by AR, and two were made by KLH under license from AR. After the CU
rating, sales tripled.
Villchur continued to research improvements in sound reproduction, turning his attention to the
tweeter. He received
U.S. Patent 3,033,945
for his invention of the direct-radiator dome tweeter. This greatly
improved high-frequency fidelity by its smooth response and wide
dispersion of sound, and complemented the acoustic suspension
woofer’s
improved bass response. The AR-3, which combined the acoustic
suspension woofer with the dome tweeter, is considered Villchur’s
ultimate achievement in speakers. An example of this model is on display
in the Information Age Exhibit of The National Museum of American
History at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Virtually
every loudspeaker today uses Villchur’s innovations: Acoustic Suspension
Woofers and Dome Tweeters.
Villchur continued to do research, production design, and technical
writing during his tenure as president of AR. One of his strongly held
views was that the only appropriate criterion to determine the quality
of high-fidelity components was comparison with the actual live music in
performance. In keeping with that philosophy, AR produced a series of
“Live versus Recorded” concerts in which live performances by musical
ensembles were compared with previously taped performances played
through AR stereo equipment. Musicians participating in these concerts
included the Fine Arts String Quartet and classical guitarist
Gustavo Lopez, as well as performances on a thirty-two foot pipe organ and an old-fashioned
nickelodeon. The
Washington Post
featured the Live vs. Recorded concerts with a half-page article with
pictures, providing free publicity for AR, in which they said that
audiences were fooled over and over by the seamless transitions between
live performance and sound reproduced through the AR speakers.
As president of AR, Villchur was known for progressive employment
practices and innovative advertising techniques. AR used equal
opportunity employment practices, and employees received
health insurance
and profit sharing—benefits which were highly unusual in any but the
largest firms in the 1950s and 1960s. The company was also known for its
liberal repair policies, fixing most products for free no matter how
old they were, and in general providing excellent
customer service.
AR’s advertising was distinct from the sensationalistic ads of its
competitors, instead concentrating on technical information, reviews by
impartial critics, and endorsements from well-known musicians and other
personalities who actually used Acoustic Research components. Villchur
believed that each ad should provide accurate information and
unsolicited endorsements in order to convince the reader of the quality
of the product. The list of well-known artists who appeared with their
AR stereo equipment in print advertisements included
Virgil Thomson,
Miles Davis, and
Louis Armstrong.
In addition, the company established locations called “Music Rooms”
where the public could listen to music through AR components and could
ask questions of knowledgeable hosts, but where no selling took place.
The most famous of the Music Rooms was in
Grand Central Station,
and became known as a quiet haven in the middle of the noisy terminal.
During one year the New York Music Room counted over one hundred
thousand visitors. Another Music Room was located in Cambridge,
Massachusetts at Harvard Square.
In 1961, Villchur designed a turntable (record player), and published
an article explaining its several innovations. The tone arm and
turntable platen were mounted together and suspended independently from
the body of the turntable, so that a shock to the body of the turntable
would have little effect on the playing of the record. Indeed, Villchur
was fond of demonstrating this independent suspension by hitting the
wooden base of the turntable with a mallet while the record played on
flawlessly. The mechanical isolation of the tone-arm-platen assembly
from the base had a further advantage. It eliminated the “muddy” bass
sound that often resulted when vibrations from the loudspeaker were
conducted through the floor and caused feedback through the pickup into
the amplifier.
The low mass and damped suspension of the tone arm itself compensated
for any irregularities on the surface of the disk so that even warped
records could often be played without distortion. When released, the
tone arm floated down to the record, so that if it were dropped, it
would not crash into the disc (which could harm both the needle and the
record). With its quiet motor and precision-ground rubber drive belt,
the turntable had extremely low
wow and
flutter (the lowest of any turntable on the market at that time), and far exceeded the
National Association of Broadcasters
(National Association of Broadcasters) standards for turntable
measurements. The overall look of the turntable was given an award by
Industrial Design magazine.
Acoustic Research continued to expand its loudspeaker line, producing
the smaller “bookshelf” speaker, the AR-4, which was popular among
college students and younger families. In 1966, Stereo Review’s yearly
summary of the high-fidelity equipment showed that AR’s loudspeaker
sales represented almost one-third of the entire market, a share that
had never been achieved by any hi-fi company before that, and which has
never been equalled since.
In 1967, Villchur sold AR to
Teledyne,
and signed an agreement not to go into business in the field of sound
reproduction equipment. Teledyne kept the AR name, and continued to
produce stereo equipment. Although it was Villchur’s plan for the
company to produce a complete set of sound reproduction components, he
sold the company before the amplifier and receiver became part of the
line.
Hearing aid research and development
When he left AR, Villchur went back to working as a researcher. He chose the field of
hearing aids,
since he felt that there was considerable room for improvement in these
devices. He pointed out to an interviewer that when you see a person
with eyeglasses, you assume that whatever vision problem they might have
is fully corrected by their glasses. But when you see a person with a
hearing aid, you assume that the person still has hearing difficulties.
He set out to change that, and spent several years investigating the
problem in his home laboratory in
Woodstock, NY.
Villchur worked with many volunteer subjects to analyze the various
types of hearing loss. He discovered that traditional hearing aids of
the day amplified loud sounds to the same extent as quiet sounds. He
quickly realized, however, that quiet sounds needed more amplification
than loud sounds. In fact, loud sounds might need no amplification at
all. Many of his subjects complained that their hearing aids made soft
sounds audible, but amplified moderately loud sounds to a painful level.
By 1973, he had come up with a revolutionary concept in hearing aid
design. This was the idea of using multi-channel compression to make up
for the variable loss of loudness. Each patient’s
audiogram,
combined with individual testing, would determine the correct program
for that person. It was multi-channel so that those with hearing losses
in specific frequency ranges could receive amplification where needed.
More importantly, he used “wide dynamic range compression” (WDRC).
Unlike the previous “compression limiting” circuits, which limited loud
sounds to a certain level but did nothing to increase the gain for quiet
sounds, Villchur’s WDRC amplifiers increased gain for softer sounds
without excessively amplifying louder sounds.
Rather than apply for a patent, he decided to publish his findings and make them available to anyone who wanted to use them.
Fred Waldhauer of
Bell Labs
heard Villchur lecture on this new hearing aid system, and started a
Bell Labs project to develop a hearing aid. Bell Labs did not continue
with the project, but Waldhauer went on to work for
ReSound,
and bought the rights from them for the work that had been done to that
point. ReSound manufactured a programmable hearing aid based on
Villchur’s principles. Over the next twenty-five years, Villchur’s
innovations became the industry standard for hearing aid design. It is
nearly impossible to find a hearing aid today – digital or analog – that
does not use multi-channel wide dynamic range compression.
Edgar Villchur has written three books and over one hundred and fifty
articles on high fidelity, sound reproduction, audio engineering, and
hearing aid technology in both peer-reviewed scientific journals and
popular magazines, including two articles written when he was ninety
years old. At the 1995 meeting of the
Acoustical Society of America he received the Life Achievement Award from the
American Auditory Society.
Books by Edgar Villchur
- Villchur, Edgar (1999). Acoustics for Audiologists. Singular Publishing Group. ISBN 0-7693-0064-2.
- Villchur, Edgar (1965). Reproduction of Sound. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-21515-6.
- Villchur, Edgar (1957). Handbook of Sound Reproduction. Radio Magazines. ISBN 1-114-68559-3.
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