1. David Gunness is known for his work on loudspeaker design, especially high-output professional horn loudspeakers for public address, studio, theater, nightclub, concert and touring uses.
41 Facts About David Gunness
1. 2.
David Gunness worked at Eastern Acoustic Works in Massachusetts for 12 years, filing three patents in the process of creating a wide variety of loudspeaker products.
3.
David Gunness co-founded Fulcrum Acoustic in 2008: a loudspeaker company with the aim of designing loudspeakers based on digital signal processing, innovative components and high quality construction.
4.
David Gunness was born November 7,1960; he grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, enjoying outdoor activities such as bicycling, camping, hunting and fishing.
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In June 1984, David Gunness graduated UW-Madison with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
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David Gunness immediately accepted an engineering job in Buchanan, Michigan, and relocated there.
7.
Directly after graduating UW-Madison, David Gunness obtained a research and development position in the engineering department at the Electro-Voice factory in Michigan.
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In 1984, David Gunness filed a patent for a better way to use a manifold to combine the outputs of multiple compression drivers for increased sound power level, using two to four flat reflecting surfaces in the throat of a horn to redirect sound waves for a more coherent summation.
9.
In 1986, David Gunness developed the EV HP series of horn loudspeakers based on the constant directivity characteristics described by EV engineer Don Keele in the mid-1970s.
10.
David Gunness's patented design used two longitudinal ribs or vanes to form three "pseudo horns" within the horn flare.
11.
In 1989, David Gunness developed an asymmetric horn with an output pattern shaped to suit a typical small-to-mid-sized rectangular auditorium with people sitting near the enclosure hearing sound that was not too loud and others sitting farther away hearing sound that was loud enough.
12.
David Gunness researched automated methods for analyzing the performance of a loudspeaker.
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In September 1995, David 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 in Whitinsville.
14.
David Gunness 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.
15.
David Gunness said that bringing the DSP to fruition by way of rigorous mathematical performance analysis was a "massive undertaking" which gave him a broad foundation of computer analysis techniques he would draw from in later inventions.
16.
For years, David Gunness had been looking for various electronic solutions to the undesirable characteristics of horns.
17.
At EV in 1985, David Gunness noticed the performance differences between various shapes of horns, and theorized that an electronic filter might allow optimization.
18.
Mix magazine quoted David Gunness identifying compression driver "time smear" as a longstanding loudspeaker problem that was countered by preconditioning in the audio signal.
19.
At the AES convention in October 2005 in New York City, EAW project engineer William "Bill" Hoy and David Gunness presented a paper describing the mathematics of the spectrogram.
20.
David Gunness 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.
21.
David Gunness discovered that only half of the compression driver's energy, at best, goes directly from the diaphragm through a phase plug slot or port and into the horn throat.
22.
David Gunness modeled this behavior mathematically and applied an inverted signal to cancel out the later wave energy.
23.
David Gunness filed a patent for the technology in March 2006.
24.
The UX8800 was offered to allow David Gunness Focusing to be applied to selected pre-existing EAW products such as the KF700 line array series.
25.
David Gunness Focusing was nominated for but did not win a TEC Award in 2006.
26.
David Gunness joined with EAW co-founder Kenton Forsythe and engineer Jeff Rocha to design the KF760 and KF730 series line array systems.
27.
David Gunness wrote about divergence shading and general line array issues in August 2000.
28.
David Gunness appeared as a panelist at an AES line array tutorial and workshop in October 2002, held in Los Angeles.
29.
In October 2003, David Gunness wrote an article about "Digitally Steerable Array" technology for Live Sound International magazine.
30.
David Gunness expanded on the DSA concept the next month for the British Institute of Acoustics.
31.
David Gunness wrote that his research into DSA began in the 1990s and was largely based on the observations gained in developing the KF900 series.
32.
David Gunness told the IOA that each transducer in the vertical column must have its own DSP and amplifier for proper steering of the output pattern.
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David Gunness continued to research and prototype loudspeakers, and he checked Chinese production examples for quality of workmanship.
34.
David 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.
35.
David Gunness soon noticed that the time from initial concept to product launch was much faster at a small company.
36.
David Gunness further developed his proprietary FChart software, renamed "Rayleigh" in honor of Lord Rayleigh, to enhance its capabilities for developing these and future products.
37.
David Gunness helped specify and design a 16-zone, 100-loudspeaker installation at the 25,500-square-foot 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.
38.
David Gunness said that system designer John Lyons asked for a subwoofer that would "crush" at all locations on the dance floor.
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David Gunness responded by creating the US221 subwoofer with two 21-inch drivers.
40.
David Gunness noted that three US221 subwoofers supplied sufficiently high energy sound for the small dance floor.
41.
In December 2012, Wired magazine wrote about how temporal corrections developed by David Gunness cleaned up "the smear of sound" present in normal nightclub loudspeakers.