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Bill Bush—1963 - 2015


tysontom

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I read with sadness that Bill Bush, NHT speaker designer under Ken Kantor for many years, died in February of this year. Bill was a very talented and bright loudspeaker designer, and he designed many products for NHT and Acoustic Research during his many years with NHT in Benicia, California. Bill was also a very kind, friendly and honest individual with a great sense of humor, and I enjoyed spending time with him out in California at the AR/NHT plant in the late 1990s. Bill helped me get the AR Archives shipped back to the east coast in 1998, and without his help—and Recoton's legal counsel—getting these this archives would have been an impossible task. I first met Bill during the 1994 "AR 40th Birthday Party," in New York, celebrating this milestone. He was very curious about AR's great history and accomplishments.

Bill made many contributions to AR and NHT. He was the designer of the famous NHT1259 woofer, and I think that he was very involved in the overall development of Ken Kantor's excellent NHT 3.3 loudspeaker, one of the finest speakers ever designed. Bill was also very closely involved with the development and design of the Acoustic Research 303 and 303A speakers. Some have suggested that he designed them, but at least he was very involved with their development. Bill did the complete shakedown check of my early pair of AR-3a speakers to be used by Julian Hirsch of Hirsch-Houck Labs during his 1995 test in Stereo Review magazine.

Bill was a kind-hearted, unselfish man with great talent and intellect!

—Tom Tyson

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I read with sadness that Bill Bush, NHT speaker designer under Ken Kantor for many years, died in February of this year. Bill was a very talented and bright loudspeaker designer, and he designed many products for NHT and Acoustic Research during his many years with NHT in Benicia, California. Bill was also a very kind, friendly and honest individual with a great sense of humor, and I enjoyed spending time with him out in California at the AR/NHT plant in the late 1990s. Bill helped me get the AR Archives shipped back to the east coast in 1998, and without his help—and Recoton's legal counsel—getting these this archives would have been an impossible task. I first met Bill during the 1994 "AR 40th Birthday Party," in New York, celebrating this milestone. He was very curious about AR's great history and accomplishments.

Bill made many contributions to AR and NHT. He was the designer of the famous NHT1259 woofer, and I think that he was very involved in the overall development of Ken Kantor's excellent NHT 3.3 loudspeaker, one of the finest speakers ever designed. Bill was also very closely involved with the development and design of the Acoustic Research 303 and 303A speakers. Some have suggested that he designed them, but at least he was very involved with their development. Bill did the complete shakedown check of my early pair of AR-3a speakers to be used by Julian Hirsch of Hirsch-Houck Labs during his 1995 test in Stereo Review magazine.

Bill was a kind-hearted, unselfish man with great talent and intellect!

—Tom Tyson

Tom,

He sounds like one of the "Greats" judging by your eulogy. I never met him but from your description I'm sure I would have liked him.

Condolences and God bless to all his friends and family.

Roger

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Tom,

He sounds like one of the "Greats" judging by your eulogy. I never met him but from your description I'm sure I would have liked him.

Condolences and God bless to all his friends and family.

Roger

Roger,

Bill Bush was a fine gentleman, and he was very unselfish and generous with his time and information. He was also a very bright engineer, one of the smartest guys I've ever met in this field. I think that Ken probably realized his abilities early on in Bill's career working under Ken. I didn't know Bill like a best friend or anything, but we had a great friendship through the years. He was a car enthusiast (loved Corvettes) and I think he loved outdoor sports (he like to go off-roading with his trail bike, and I think he might have had a sportbike motorcycle as well).

—Tom

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sad to hear. out of curiousity, did he have a hand at all in the HO series or speakers from the '97-98 time frame?

I don't think so. Bill came into NHT right at the beginning, and he was instrumental in the design of several of NHT's speakers, such as the Super Two, VT-3 and, of course, the well-known NHT1259 woofer, used originally in the 3.3 and later as a subwoofer for generic installations. The 1259 was sort of an AR-3a woofer on steroids, as it had several similar characteristics but greater power-handling capability and longer excursion. Strangely, it had a higher fs (approx 20 Hz) than the original AR woofer (17 Hz), but it was a fine woofer and worked very well in the larger cabinet.

Bill also did work on the AR-303 and others of this generation in the AR group, but I don't think he did design work on other AR speakers to my knowledge. The AR-303 came along partly in celebration of Acoustic Research's 40th Anniversary. It was to be a modern-day equivalent of the AR-3a, and both the AR-3a and the AR-303 have very similar sound characteristics (see attached response measurements of both).

—Tom Tyson

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  • 1 year later...

Wow.  This is awful.   I'd known Bill for a good 20 years from a distance, though we did go out and had some beers when he visited once and we ran into each other at the CES shows and other gatherings.   Bill was one of the great guys, very down to earth and we'd often have speaker design discussions over the phone, talking for a good half hour or hour about his NHT designs.   And, yes, he used to have a Honda SuperHawk sport bike.    He once told me that he was mostly responsible for the 3.3s, that Ken had the basic idea, but that he did all the heavy lifting.   Ken was always a bright guy, but Bill was focused and really took his work seriously.    I do think he did do a lot or all of the AR Classic work and I remember that the AR 206 (?) robbed the woofer from the NHT SuperOne.   But alas, people would come into the store and say "hey, I remember those, now show me something modern" so they didn't sell well.   He also said that they weren't designed to be modern state of the art speakers, but something for those that missed the old sound.    I also remember that when they brought in an old Infinity engineer to create the AR HO series, Bill got called into help fix the sound of the top end model, as they were awful sounding.   He said he worked on them for over a week, making them sound halfway decent and then they came back in and undid all his work.   He was pissed off and told them that they were on their own from then on out.    I remember that he had originally designed the NHT 1.5 to have a much more refined sound because of a higher quality crossover, but he went on a business trip and while he was away, Ken and Jack made some changes to the crossover which saved the company money on inductors and capacitors and gave it the "detailed" but edgy sound it was famous for.    [We later found that replacing the 1.5 crossover with the SB3 crossover didn't just work, it accidentally made the 1.5 sound like a whole new, high-end speaker, much more like Bill's original intent) His greatest works were on the NHT VT3s which rocked.   He single handedly held NHT together when Chris Byrne and the others left NHT in a huff after an ownership change.  When they came back after yet another change, they accused Bill of ruining the company so he left and went to Cerwin-Vega where he said basically "I can only do so much because Cerwin Vegas have to sound like Cerwin Vegas", but he was proud of some of the upgrades he made.     He told me that they laid him off in the recession to save on his relatively high salary and, as many companies did, they just stopped most R&D.   So I shortly afterwards made a somewhat  snarky comment to a Sonos exec that they needed to hire Bill Bush to fix their speakers and make them sound good.    A few weeks later, I got a note from Bill saying that Sonos had contacted him out of the blue and had offered him a job and he took it.    I told him he was going to owe me something big someday.    He got so buried in his work there, we hardly spoke after that but I'd been trying to push him to get ahold of me.   I was starting to think he was angry at me for some reason as he wouldn't reply for the last couple of years.   So sad to find this out belatedly and on the internet, not from a friend in the industry.    

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John,

Thanks for your contribution regarding Bill Bush.  How did you happen to know him?  Were you in the hi-fi audio industry?

In my view, Bill was an under-appreciated, but highly talented engineer at NHT and AR during the 1990s.  He did a good deal of the "heavy lifting," and KenK will probably reaffirm this, but this is also what is expected of the engineering staff!  Bill was also exceptionally bright, witty and approachable, and he was always helpful to me, as was Ken Kantor.  While on a visit out to Benicia, California, I rode to lunch one day with Bill in his black Corvette.  He was proud of that car, and we had a great time together.  Bill and I also exchanged a lot of emails about riding motorcycles.  At that time, I was riding a Suzuki GSX-R1000 and doing track days at the several race tracks around the area, and Bill approved of my activities immensely.  He loved motorcycles and fast cars.  

Also during this time, Bill developed a health issue and struggled with an irregular cardiac rhythm (arrhythmia) that persisted for several years.  This was/is not completely abnormal, but it dogged him a great deal, and he couldn't completely eliminate the problem.  Thanks to Hewlett-Packard, my employer, and in appreciation for all he had done for me in the past, I shipped on loan, a $35k Hewlett-Packard portable, bedside-patient monitor to use to home-monitor his heart rate, etC02, Sp02 (oxygen saturation or "pulse ox"), blood pressure, ECG management and a 50mm strip-chart recorder to run off strips.  With this instrument, he could keep closer track of any issues he might be having with his occasional irregular rhythm and let him know if he was having bouts of irregular rhythm, and I think it helped him stay aware of what was going on.  It could be set to alarm -- and record -- if he was having too many PVCs or bouts of irregular rhythm and that sort of thing.  It didn't fix his issues, of course, but it helped him understand what was going on.  He was very appreciative of that unit, and he enjoyed using it for a couple of years and learning about patient-monitoring technology!  I told him he could take it apart as long as he put it back together properly, and he did just that, commenting on the gold-plated circuit boards and surface-mount technology!  He could run strip-chart recording strips and take it to his cardiologist for review.  

Nevertheless, his condition worsened over time, and he eventually returned the monitor, so I knew that the doctors didn't have things under complete control.  Bill was a fine, talented person, and he will always be missed!  By the way, if you've heard a NHT 3.3 or the AR 303, and many others, you have a sense of the talent of this engineer.  He had a great deal to do with the design of each speaker, obviously under the direction of Ken Kantor.  This was akin to Chuck McShane's contribution at AR: he did much of the heavy-lifting on the AR-3a, AR-4x, AR-5, AR-6 and so forth under the oversight of Roy Allison.

--Tom Tyson

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