Henry Kloss
Henry Kloss (February 21, 1929 – January 31, 2002) was a prominent American audio engineer and entrepreneur who helped advance high fidelity loudspeaker and radio receiver technology beginning in the 1950s.
[1] Kloss (pronounced with a long o, like "close"[1]) was an undergraduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (class of 1953), but never received a degree.
He was responsible for a number of innovations, including, in part, the acoustic suspension loudspeaker and the high fidelity cassette deck.
During the course of his half-century career, Kloss founded or co-founded several significant audio and video equipment manufacturing companies, most of which were located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least during the period he was directly associated with them.
[2] Kloss was an early adopter of new technology, including the transistor, Dolby noise reduction, and chromium dioxide magnetic recording tape.
Villchur, a former teacher of Kloss, had designed what he called the "acoustic suspension" loudspeaker, an elegant solution to the problem of bass harmonic distortion.
Villchur had tried to sell the patent to both Altec Lansing and Bozak, manufacturers of large speakers at the time, but neither company was interested.
This resulted in the KLH Model Forty reel-to-reel tape recorder, the first appearance of Dolby technology in the consumer product market.
[citation needed] Having pioneered large-screen video projection systems, Kloss found himself undercut by lower-cost models from Japan, and he eventually shut down his company.
[1] Former Cambridge SoundWorks co-founder Tom DeVesto founded Tivoli Audio in 2000 to sell a new table radio which Kloss designed after a brief retirement.
The high-quality tuner combined with a good speaker arrangement led some reviewers to call these modern radios "Bose killers".
[6] Very early in his career, Kloss decided to concentrate on designing audiovisual equipment which combined high quality, often with leading-edge consumer technology, with moderate pricing.
