[1] Directly after graduating UW-Madison, Gunness obtained a research and development position in the engineering department at the Electro-Voice (EV) factory in Michigan.

Under Chief Engineer Ray Newman, Gunness worked on loudspeaker design, combining traditional empirical R&D methodologies with the emerging capabilities of computer analysis.

The medium low frequencies were carried by four 10-inch (250 mm) cone drivers summed using a larger embodiment of the Gunness manifold concept based on ray tracing and reflection.

Gunness recognized that relatively large 2-inch (51 mm) horn throats, commonly used for greater SPL, produced an undesirable narrowing of the output pattern above 10 kHz.

In 1990 he delivered a paper to the AES describing a system which used pink noise and a filtered receiver to generate polar response curves plotting loudspeaker output patterns.

[13] In September 1995, Gunness moved his family, now including a son and a daughter, from Michigan to Massachusetts in response to his taking a position as senior engineer at Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW) in Whitinsville.

He then began to research the concept of phased point source behavior with the goal of controlling the directional characteristics of a high-powered concert loudspeaker cluster.

[19] In his work to predict the performance of various KF900 loudspeaker configurations, Gunness used acoustical measurement and modeling software called FChart that he started developing while still at Electro-Voice.

In early 1995, EV gained access to Altec Lansing's 1987 Acousta-CADD acoustic modeling software which revealed more loudspeaker performance characteristics than had previously been observed, but DSP programming tools were still inadequate for audio signal correction.

[23] Building on this work, Gunness led a team of EAW engineers to develop a proprietary wavelet transform spectrogram for internal research.

Because of their variability the methodology would not be used on any of the mechanisms which appeared to be non-linear relative to signal level, spatial distribution ("coverage"), or over time, such as cone stiffness or surround compliance.

[24][25] In April 2005, EAW announced the NT Series, a line of 2-way bi-amplified self-powered loudspeakers incorporating the "new technology" which was initially called "Digital Transduction Correction" (DTC).

[26] Mix magazine quoted Gunness identifying compression driver "time smear" as a longstanding loudspeaker problem that was countered by preconditioning in the audio signal.

[25][27] At the AES convention in October 2005 in New York City, EAW project engineer William "Bill" Hoy and Gunness presented a paper describing the mathematics of the spectrogram.

He described how the spectrogram allowed the EAW engineering team to observe the mechanism of time smear occurring in the small space between the compression driver diaphragm and the phase plug.

[31] Gunness joined with EAW co-founder Kenton Forsythe and engineer Jeff Rocha to design the KF760 and KF730 series line array systems.

The vertical output pattern of the individual line array elements was adjusted to optimize SPL received by near- and far-field audience areas.

[32] This method avoided what Gunness said was a discontinuity between adjacent loudspeaker enclosures driven at different signal levels; he observed smeared transients and frequency response problems.

The flat position eliminated the problem of acoustic energy radiating from the back of the enclosure, smearing the forward output with multi-path arrival times.

In late 2006, LOUD moved EAW's loudspeaker production to China; the Massachusetts factory which had employed 100 assembly and woodshop workers was greatly reduced.

[47] EAW's plant retained the ability to fill some custom loudspeaker orders, they kept a number of management and clerical positions, and also the design team of Kenton Forsythe, David Gunness and Jeff Rocha.

[48] Gunness left EAW in January 2008 to join with partners Stephen Siegel and Chris Alfiero in the establishment of Fulcrum Acoustic, a loudspeaker design and manufacturing company.

Gunness helped specify and design a 16-zone, 100-loudspeaker installation at the 25,500-square-foot (2,370 m2) Haze nightclub at Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, and he joined with Jamie Anderson of Rational Acoustics to discuss the loudspeaker performance targets and system tuning process via Smaart software, the talk given at a technical tour held in June 2010 during the Infocomm convention.

[55] In December 2012, Wired magazine wrote about how temporal corrections developed by Gunness cleaned up "the smear of sound" present in normal nightclub loudspeakers.