While at Vaucluse Boys' High School, Jackson was discovered by investigators of the Postmaster-General's Department, along with a group of his electronics-minded schoolmates, Phillip Storey, Wally Pearce, Bruce Morrison and Adrian Wood operating a pirate radio station "2VH", with a too-powerful AM transmitter—which the boys operated during and after school, and on the weekends, tuned to 1350 kHz in the upper end of the commercial AM band to avoid more powerful commercial radio station signals.

[6] The boys did not know that their tube transmitter and very long, very efficient full wavelength antenna were so well crafted that their unlicensed signal was broadcasting all over Sydney and parts of the state of New South Wales 600 km away, at night time.

[4][8] The partnership's largest customer, Roger Foley, doing business as Ellis D Fogg,[9] a producer of psychedelic lighting effects, refused to write out the full company name and instead wrote JandS on his checks.

[8] After moving the company from Point Piper to Rose Bay, JANDS made "whatever the hell they felt like", according to Jackson: lighting equipment, guitar amplifiers and public address system components such as column loudspeakers.

[6] He described how, with so many American servicemen stationed in Vietnam spending their recreation time in Sydney, Australian bands and clubs were doing well: "the live music scene was jumping, and we were busy".

[4] Jackson first met Roy Clair in 1970 during a world tour by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears when they stopped at Sydney for a concert held at Randwick Racecourse.

[6][10] Clair had brought his unusually large American concert sound system to Australia and Jackson was curious to hear it, and to see how the big black 'W' bins were designed.

[6] Clair decided to leave his sound system in Jackson's hands for a series of Johnny Cash tour dates coming up in some six months, rather than shipping all the gear home to the USA and back in between.

[6] One night in Fort Worth, Texas, Presley led the audience in singing "Happy Birthday to You" in honour of the engineer's birthday—an "amazing, and very embarrassing" occasion for Jackson.

[14] Jackson mixed hundreds of concerts for the singer, who called him "Bruce the Goose"[15]—a working life filled with strange hours, hard physical labour and constant travelling.

Prior to each tour, Springsteen and the E Street Band practised at Clair Brothers in Lititz to check out new sound system components and lighting effects, and to give crew members a chance to work out the technical details.

Jackson said, "we can do a lot about it", and worked with Clair Brothers to design a ring of delay loudspeakers positioned closer to the farthest seats to augment the high frequencies lost over distance by sound waves travelling through air.

[19] Throughout Jackson's years with him, Springsteen maintained his interest in delivering high quality sound to every seat, and the solutions grew in size and complexity until by 1984 there were eight delay towers set up for the largest venues.

Jackson determined that huge concert venues such as Wembley Stadium and Madison Square Garden would be carpeted for Streisand, and that expensive heavy drapes would be hung at the walls to damp sound reflections.

[26] Sharing sound designer and FOH mixing duties with Chris Carlton, Jackson made certain that the custom soft dome monitor wedges were positioned correctly aiming up from under the stage to cover everywhere Streisand might walk.

[27] Clair Brothers supplied 18 Dolby Lake Processors for the tour, the majority used by Jackson to tune the main sound system, and the rest for control of monitor wedges used by Streisand and by the supporting artist, Il Divo.

To wire the spectacle which played to 110,000 people in attendance and some 3 billion distant viewers around the world, redundant systems were connected throughout so that a single failure point could not halt the show.

[38] Beginning in 1979 between Springsteen tour dates, Jackson crisscrossed the U.S. promoting the Fairlight CMI, a digital sampler made by fellow Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie.

[6] Wonder, who had recently recorded Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" using a Computer Music Melodian sampler, paid for his Fairlight by signing a personal check with his thumbprint.

[6] During an April 1985 Springsteen tour leg in Japan, Jackson first listened to Compact Discs played on a CD player connected to his concert sound system, and he did not like what he heard.

Jackson, Bennett and Heidelberger formed Apogee Electronics in December 1985 (announced in the 23 November issue of Billboard[39]) and started investigating 44 kHz digital audio circuits for audible problems.

They found that "textbook filters" which were unnecessarily steep were protecting the CD player output from high levels of 20 kHz signals, an exceedingly unlikely occurrence in music.

[6] Jackson determined that Apogee could improve the sound of CDs if the low-pass filters used in the recording process were made less steep, for less phase shift throughout the hearing range.

Bennett said in 2005 that the company's decision to sell purple-coloured products was one of Jackson's ideas: "He has a good eye for design, and we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the all-black rack gear that everybody had at that point.

[6] From the same garage in which he started Apogee, Jackson developed the proprietary Clair iO: a two-input, six-output digital audio matrix with opto-isolated output circuits.

[48] For Presley's band rehearsals at Graceland, Jackson would fly some 800 miles (1,300 km) from Lititz to Memphis with the back of a small plane loaded with assorted mic stands, cables and monitor loudspeakers.

[2][49] Jackson used the M20J to carry Fairlight samplers across the U.S. to demonstrate them to studios and musicians, once flying from New York to Los Angeles in 15 hours after he heard Herbie Hancock was interested.

[6] Interviewed in 2005 at his Sydney office, Jackson said he missed his "little plane" terribly, that it was kept in a hangar for his use whenever he visited California,[6] surrounded by dusty boxes of audio gear and stored memorabilia.

[23] Jackson landed his Mooney at Furnace Creek Airport (the lowest elevation airstrip in North America) near the visitor center of Death Valley National Park early in the afternoon of 29 January 2011.

Following a brief stop he took off in clear, sunny weather bound for Santa Monica, but a few minutes later he crashed and died about 6.5 miles (11 km) south of the airfield in a dry lake bed.