Edgar Marion Villchur (28 May 1917 – 17 October 2011[2]) was an American inventor,[2] educator, and writer widely known for his 1954 invention of the acoustic suspension loudspeaker which revolutionized the field of high-fidelity equipment.

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.

After the war, Villchur opened a shop in New York's Greenwich Village where he repaired radios and built custom home high fidelity sets.

Despite having a master's 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 he titled Reproduction of Sound.

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."

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.

Villchur's new and sophisticated understanding of the inexorable relationship among low-frequency extension, efficiency, and cabinet volume was later termed, by Henry Kloss, "Hofmann's Iron Law".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bell Labs assigned a team of experts, including Jont B. Allen, David A. Berkley, Joseph L. Hall and Harry Levitt (City University of NY, Graduate center).