30 Facts About Tom Danley

Thomas J Danley was born on 1952 and is an American audio engineer, electrical engineer and inventor, the holder of multiple patents for audio transducers, especially high-linearity, high-output professional horn loudspeaker systems.

Tom Danley was raised in the northern area of Illinois, around Highland Park, north of Chicago.

Tom Danley studied mechanisms by taking them apart, and he learned to arc weld by age 12.

Tom Danley attended Deerfield High School, obtaining his diploma in five years instead of four.

Tom Danley designed loudspeakers for the company, and for individual musicians such as keyboardist Joan Gand.

Tom Danley was amazed when he listened to the tape after the show; the tape held a wider frequency range, a higher fidelity experience than was heard at the nightclub.

Tom Danley realized that the loudspeakers must have been a significant limiting factor.

Tom Danley left Steamer Sound to work as an electronics technician at Data Specialties in Northbrook, where in 1976 he first used a computer, a VIC-20, to write a program to perform the math calculations he needed at work.

Tom Danley was repairing teleprinters and punch card readers, and had almost given up on concert audio in his career.

Tom Danley invented many devices while at Intersonics, obtaining 17 patents.

Tom Danley designed and built major components of the payload on Space Shuttle flights STS-7 in 1983 and STS-51-A in 1984.

Tom Danley experimented on his own with a loudspeaker based on the servomotor, and showed the third prototype to his employer.

Tom Danley designed a variety of models including W bins, seeing the most success with the folded horn BassTech 7 subwoofer which performed very well.

The enclosure included Tom Danley's patented cooling fan powered by a DC-rectified portion of the audio signal, kicking in only at high voltage levels.

Tom Danley designed the Pachyderm 6, an enclosure with two 15-inch drivers connected to a servo motor, and four 18-inch passive radiators.

Tom Danley's 3-way design was an improvement on the 2-way CoEntrant patent by Ralph Heinz in 1996.

In 2001, Tom Danley began developing the "Unity" horn for license to Yorkville Sound, patenting the improvement in 2002.

Tom Danley discussed the benefits and tradeoffs of horn versus front-loaded subwoofers, and offered to model a horn enclosure based on the desired size, frequency response and power handling.

Tom Danley partnered with entrepreneur Mike Hedden in 2005 to form Tom Danley Sound Labs, a loudspeaker company based in Gainesville, Georgia, near Atlanta.

Tom Danley's Synergy Horn concept was an improvement on the multiple entry design of the SPL-td1.

Tom Danley's Tapped Horn concept directs sound from the rear of a horn-loaded driver into ports that are vented into the horn closer to the mouth of the horn, farther from the driver at the throat of the horn.

Tom Danley's Shaded Amplitude Lens technology, patented in 2009, uses vanes to deflect portions of the high frequency driver output so that the different paths produce an output pattern appropriate for large venues, such that the farther audience hears much the same amplitude and sound fidelity as the near audience.

In 2011, Tom Danley filed a patent for DSL's Paraline Technology, a method of combining the output of multiple high frequency drivers into a common output chamber or horn.

The Jericho Horn incorporates Tom Danley's patented Shaded Amplitude Lens technology.

Tom Danley appeared in the 1993 documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx to demonstrate acoustic levitation.

Tom Danley was an early adopter of the Crown Tecron TEF audio analysis system, introduced in 1983, and he used a TEF-10 portable test rig to measure his audio experiments.

At the request of the same documentary producer, in the 1990s Tom Danley used a TEF-12 analyzer to assess the acoustics inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In 2019 Tom Danley was recognized as an audio industry pioneer by AVIXA, the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association.

Tom Danley received the Adele De Berri Pioneers of AV Award.

When his marriage dissolved in the late 1980s, Tom Danley raised his two daughters as a single father.