Rudy Bozak

[1] Fresh out of college in 1933, Rudy Bozak began working for Allen-Bradley, an electronics manufacturer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The loudspeakers were mounted into horns with 14' wide mouths and were each driven by a 500 watt amplifier derived from a high-power radio broadcast tube.

During World War II, Bozak worked with Lincoln Walsh at Dinion Coil Company in Caledonia, New York developing very high voltage power supplies for radar.

[3] In 1950 Bozak was hired as a consultant by McIntosh Laboratory[4] to develop a square loudspeaker driver unit but it was not an engineering success.

Bozak met Emory Cook in the early 1950s; the two hit it off and began working in a shared warehouse basement facility in Stamford.

By the mid-1950s, Bozak had expanded into new quarters at 587 Connecticut Avenue in South Norwalk, with an export office in Hicksville, New York.

The woofer cone was molded from a slurry containing paper pulp, lamb's wool and other ingredients in a secret process.

[5] Henry Mancini and Benny Goodman, good friends of Rudy Bozak, owned Concert Grand speaker systems.

Bozak began offering smaller speaker systems to answer consumer demand, but none were noted for exceptional performance until the LS-200 and LS-200A of the late 1970s.

[8] In 1963, the newly established commercial loudspeaker division was employing about 60 people dedicated to manufacturing the columnar model which was proving a great success.

For the 1964 New York World's Fair, Bozak again put forward a new loudspeaker design; this time in the Vatican Pavilion.

Bozak accepted occasional United States Department of Defense contracts including an underwater low frequency driver intended for acoustic communication between ocean-going vessels and a vibration platform that Bozak employees called "The Shaker" which was meant to test the integrity of electronic assemblies in action.

Bozak is often remembered today for his advanced designs of DJ mixers which allowed the development of the concept of disc jockey mixing and 'discotheques'.

The Bozak CMA mixers were very expensive: they used high-grade Allen-Bradley components, hand-selected transistors, and were of modular construction for ease of servicing and expansion.

C/M Laboratories, co-founded by Wayne Chou and Nick Morris, collaborated with Rudy Bozak, in the mid-1960s on the construction of basic mono mixers and power amplifiers.

[14][15] The Bozak brand is now owned by Analog Developments Ltd. who have released electronic products such as the ISO-X isolator and the AR-6 DJ mixer.

Bozak developed an electronic digital delay device in the early 1970s and used it to align loudspeakers in time within event spaces.

When both Bozak and Marantz teamed up to demonstrate loudspeakers at Hi-Fi events and audio engineering conventions, a sizable crowd would form.

The B-401 Rhapsody speaker was reviewed in August 1974, in High Fidelity,[18] where it was said to have good power handling and a more constant impedance curve than most.

When Rudy Bozak turned 67 in 1977, he offered an opportunity for an employee buy-out headed by Bob Betts, his chief engineer.

In 1975, Bruce Zayde was hired by Bozak and Schlig as technical director; he began by implementing computer-aided design (CAD) as a tool, hosted on an HP 9800 running a COMTRAN program developed by Deane Jensen.

[23] Zayde introduced Thiele/Small design principles regarding system development so that loudspeakers could be optimized at the outset for any proposed configuration.

[24] Rudy Bozak was not in favor of using ports or vents to tune loudspeaker enclosures for greater low-frequency output from a smaller box.

As the first ported loudspeaker model was being prototyped at his former company, Rudy Bozak remained skeptical but was willing to stand back and observe the results achieved using the new scientific design methods.

Later, working with Richard Majestic, for whom Ledermann worked previously at RAM Audio, the two men designed the new Listener series, the LS-200A, 220-A, 330-A and others, employing a soft dome tweeter for the first time, as the Bozak tweeter did not have the top end range extension needed to attract the changing marketplace.

This compact loudspeaker contained a soft dome tweeter, a 6" 209-W wide range aluminum driver designed by Ledermann, and a modified first order crossover.

[28] A civil court case was initiated by Seal Audio, Inc. (Joseph Schlig, CEO, President and Director)[29] against Bozak, Inc.

[31] The case has subsequently been quoted as meaning that "a party cannot withhold objection in anticipation of favorable outcome while reserving right to impeach decision if it later proves to be unfavorable.

[33] Bozak was awarded an AES Fellowship in 1965 for "valuable contributions to the advancement in or dissemination of knowledge of audio engineering or in the promotion of its application in practice."

Many references to Bozak (often spelled Bozack) can be found in modern hip hop music song titles and lyrics where the word can stand for the Bozak DJ mixer as well as for ability and virility: A producer known as "Mister Bozack" has worked with Def Jam Recordings on several rap albums for Redman and EPMD.