主题：[公告]Albert Neville Thiele 2012年10月一日不幸辞世

Neville Thiele, a former vice president, Interna-tional of the AES, has died in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 91. A Queenslan-der by birth, Neville was a friend to all who knew him, within the AES and outside, a great scholar, a fine engineer, a bushwalker, and a man of peace. 

“Born within the smell of the Castlemaine Four-X Brewery” as Neville cheerfully told everyone, he spent his childhood in the city of Brisbane and its suburbs. His father, a quali-fied pharmacist, taught Neville and his brother Leonard core elements of confidence through his own passion for singing and poetry recital. By the age of 12 Neville and his brother were experienced concert, choir, and solo performers at their Milton State School, and they performed at the Theatre Royal ama-teur hours in Elizabeth St., Brisbane. Neville continued his education on a scholarship to Brisbane Grammar School

In the 1930’s Brisbane radio was in its formative years, exploring all manner of low-cost entertainment including talent quests and children’s shows. Neville and Len were thus able to regularly broadcast songs and poetry their father had taught them. At this time Neville also became interested in the technology of these radio stations—simple affairs and very much hands-on. Being per-formers and so experiencing the reality of back-stage antics, these impressionable brothers followed desirable career opportu-nities as radio entertainers, and perhaps as broadcast engineers.

Helped by Neville, Len went on to a distin-guished career in entertainment, making the transition to television, and ultimately film, along the way. (He changed the spelling of his name to Leonard Teale in response to market pressures.) Neville was to support live theater actively all his life, taking lead roles in some amateur dramatic productions.

It was during this time that Neville became fascinated with the possibility of electrical equalizer networks improving the quality of their recordings. By 1942 he devel-oped and was to ready to communicate the first of his ideas, the bridged-T equalizer in the local Amalgamated Wireless, Australia (AWA) publication Radiotronics.

One day without warning the bank announced to Neville that he was to be posted to a bank branch in Mackay (1000 miles away). Neville survived this apparently

unprovoked attack as he was then support-ing his mother in Brisbane. He later sur-mised that the combination of the under-graduate left-wing tendencies of university reviews and the people they attract, together with the misfortune of having taken a liking to the daughter of a major in military intelli-gence charged with fighting subversion had sealed his fate for the following twenty years.

The experience of war and in particular the shooting of enemy soldiers at close quarters had a profound and lasting effect on Neville. The latter was to haunt him for the rest of his days, and he would make frequent reference to these acts of cruelty in moments of reflec-tion, yet throughout his life outwardly dis-played his engaging sparkle and a finely honed sense of the ridiculous. By now Neville was also firmly convinced that he would not return from the war and so lived each and

every day as a bonus while remaining vigilant against remote, disingenuous command.

Engineering held a strong attraction for Neville, as did his well-established interest in the theater. Both Neville and his like-minded study partner, Doug Lampard, actively involved themselves in Sydney University reviews. In those days they and their team had to do everything, becoming writers, pro-ducers, performers, and, quite often, critics. The interest was so strong that the pair failed to meet the Dean’s requirements in second year but, thankfully, were given a year to redeem themselves. Doug Lampard later went on to become the professor of electrical engineering at Monash University.

With the start of television in Australia imminent, Neville spent six months of 1955 in the UK laboratories of EMI at Hayes, Mid-dlesex, and at associated companies in Scan-dinavia and the United States. On return to Australia, Neville led the design team that developed EMI’s earliest Australian television receivers. However, when new ideas were proposed, management was not greatly interested. So, in 1959 when the young engi-neer suggested a new approach to loud-speaker design it was largely ignored by EMI.

The general rejection by EMI to Neville’s new ideas marked a pivotal point in his career. Neville summarily published the first of his rejected yet seminal papers on loudspeaker parameters in the Proceedings of the Institu-tion of Radio and Electronics Engineers Aus-tralia in August 1961, then immediately went for an interview for a position in the Studies and Design Laboratory of the ABC. 

It was in 1964, during Neville’s early years at the ABC, that a young Californian engi-neer, Richard Small, arrived at Sydney Uni-versity wishing to study for a Ph.D. on loud-speakers. The two men were introduced and they began a collaboration which would lead to the Thiele–Small parameters for the design of loudspeakers and their enclosures. Dick and Neville became celebrities in the audio industry, and were presented with medals and honors all over the world.

Neville gave generously of his time. He was involved in national and international broad-casting standards, was a member of five of the seven committees advising the Australian Broadcasting Control Board on standards for the introduction of Australia’s color television service (1969 to 1974), was chairman of the working party on the standard demodulator. In 1980, and subsequently in 1981, 1983, and 1985 he represented Australia at international standards for sound and television broadcast-ing with the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. He was an active member, too, of CCIR Interim Working Parties on International Exchange of Sound Programmes, Subjective Testing of Television Picture Quality, and

High Definition Television. 

He was a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and a Fel-low of the Institution of Engineers Australia, and of the Audio Engineering Society of which he was vice president, International Region from 1991–93 and again from 2001–05. During this time he actively pro-moted the establishment of the Chinese chapter of the AES. He was president of the Institution of Radio and Electronics Engi-neers Australia from 1986 to 1988. 

In 1991 he was appointed Honorary Visit-ing Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and in 1994 was made an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he taught part-time in the Graduate Audio Program until he was 89 (2010).

In 2003 Neville and Richard Small jointly received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for their work on loud-speakers. In that same year, Neville was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to audio engineering. In 2004 the IREE (Institution of Radio and Elec-tronic Engineers, Australia, now Institute of Engineers) named their most prestigious award recognizing eminence in information, telecommunications, and electronic engi-neering the “Neville Thiele Award.” In 2008 Neville was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sydney, and in 2009 the Peter Barnett Memorial Award of the (British) Institute of Acoustics.