This is extremely sad. John Eargle ran Mercury Sound Studios, which was located right down the block from Fine Recording, in the late 60's. At the time he built and ran that studio, it was a real-deal recording and mastering facility, not just an editing and safety-making facility as the earlier "Mercury Sound Studios" on 5th Ave. was. I believe John was also instrumental in setting up Mercury's San Francisco studio in the mid or late 60's. Mercury quickly got out of the studio business when the economy and record business turned down post-Vietnam.
When the Bose 911 speaker came out, John put together a demo LP of Mercury classical material that Bose distributed to dealers and maybe early buyers of the speakers. He went back to the 3-tracks and did his own 3-2 mixdown.
John wrote a very good history of JBL and James Lansing: http://www.jblpro.com/pages/history1.htm
Plus many of us are familiar with his textbook(s).
RIP John Eargle.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 9:29 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: John Eargle...
Sad news, indeed...
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 03:45:02 -0700 From: Garry Margolis Subject: John Eargle...
It is with great sadness that I inform you that John Eargle, one of the finest audio engineers and teachers it's been my privilege to know, has passed away.
He was scheduled to speak to an Audio Engineering Society chapter in Minnesota on Tuesday evening, and when he failed to communicate with them, his JBL colleagues went to his home and found his body.
John had a Masters in Music from Eastman and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma. He was a fine pianist -- he had a Boesendorfer Concert Grand with extended bass in his living room, and it shared the room with his Steinway D until the latter was sold. His superb musicianship was evident in the many recordings he engineered for Delos.
I met him when we worked together at JBL, and we quickly became friends as well as colleagues. Although he retired from recording a few years ago, he continued to consult for Harman International as well as write and revise his superb textbooks on audio. He was a regular lecturer at the Aspen Recording Institute every summer, and he was a frequent speaker at both Acoustical Society of America and Audio Engineering Society meetings.
For the past two decades, I had the privilege of assisting him with his computing needs. He was expert in computer technical drawing -- he did all of his own book illustrations -- and, with the changes in technical publishing, he became fluent in page layout as well. In recent years, he took up photography with typically excellent results.
Because he lived alone and was concerned about what could happen if he had a medical emergency, he recently decided to sell his home in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl and move into a retirement community. Ironically, his concern was justified.
Requiescat in pacem, my friend...
Garry