Jim Brown

EDUCATION: B.S., Electrical Engineering, 1964, University of Cincinnati. Major in communications systems, with cooperative work in broadcasting and communications electronics manufacturing. His studies also included music theory. Mr. Brown learned radio and electronics as a teen-ager, qualifying for Amateur Extra and First Class Radiotelephone licenses by the time he had finished high school. He has attended and assisted with numerous Syn-Aud-Con Seminars and Workshops.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: After college, Mr. Brown was an instructor of math, electronics, communications, and television systems at Chicago's DeVry Institute of Technology for five years. He entered professional audio in 1971, working in and managing the service departments of major Chicago area sound and communications contractors, with responsibilities for audio, video, intercom, security, and audio-visual systems. Concurrently, he was active with sound reinforcement, recording and broadcasting of live entertainment, accepting a part-time job in a local night club featuring jazz and popular music. During this period, he produced and engineered the recording for broadcast of more than thirty "Jazz Alive" programs for National Public Radio (NPR), designed and supervised both broadcast and sound reinforcement systems for two week-long jazz festivals, and designed and supervised broadcast audio and sound reinforcement for more than a dozen major live television music specials. Two of the specials won "Emmies" and two others were nominated. The 2002 release of his 1976 recording, Carmen McRae At Ratso's, was awarded 4 1/2 stars by a Downbeat reviewer.

In 1978, Mr. Brown began a seven-year association with a small Chicago sound contractor, for which he conceived and developed professional sales and sound rental divisions. He continued designing sound reinforcement and recording systems, and began a consulting practice. He has been a full time audio consultant since 1984 and has designed hundreds of audio and video systems for both permanent and portable installation. Mr. Brown founded the Audio Systems Group, Inc. in 1985.

PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES: Mr. Brown is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), and a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), and the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE). He served on the Chicago White Paper Audio for Video Coalition, which established standards for audio distributed with video for production and broadcast use. Mr. Brown is a member of the Technical Committee of the Audio Engineering Society for Architectural Acoustics and Sound Reinforcement and the AES Standards Committee. He is Chair of the AES Technical Committee on EMC, Vice-Chair of the AES Standards Committee Working Group on EMC, and a member of Working Groups for Loudspeakers, Microphones, Acoustic modeling, the Interconnection of audio systems, and Digital input/output interfacing, and the Task Group on Intelligibility.

RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS: Mr. Brown has a keen interest in the human perception of sound, sound reproduction, and recording. An early user of Time Delay Spectrometry (TDS), he was a leader in the measurement of the performance of sound transducers and broadcast signal processors using that technique. He has also been a leader in the design of stereophonic reinforcement systems and radio frequency issues affecting audio. He has presented invited papers to the Acoustical Society of America, the Audio Engineering Society, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the Society of Broadcast Engineers, US Institute for Theater Technology, and the University of Wisconsin Broadcaster's Clinic, and developed and taught advanced courses at Chicago's Columbia College.

As Vice-Chair of the AES Standards Committee Working Group on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC), he chaired the Task Group that produced AES48, AES54-1, AES54-2, and AES54-3 and was a principal author of those standards. Other recent publications include "The Acoustics of Baseball," "Systems For Stereophonic Sound Reinforcement," and "Microphone and Production Techniques for Stereophonic Sound Reinforcement" (invited by the Acoustical Society of America), "Radio Frequency Susceptibility of Capacitor Microphones,", "Common-Mode to Differential-Mode Conversion in Shielded Twisted-Pair Cables (Shield Current Induced Noise)", "Testing for Radio-Frequency Common Impedance Coupling (the 'Pin 1 Problem') in Microphones and Other Audio Equipment," "A Novel Method of Testing for Susceptibility of Audio Equipment to Interference from Medium and High Frequency Radio Transmitters," and "A Better Approach to Passive Microphone Splitting," presented to the AES. Mr. Brown has organized and chaired AES Workshops on Outdoor Sound Reinforcement and on Line Arrays, and has made presentations on those topics to local AES chapters. His writing has also been published by Sound and Communications Magazine, Sound and Video Contractor Magazine, Technologies for Worship Magazine, and the newsletter of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. A large collection of his photographs was published (uncredited) by the Southern Illinois University Press in the 1996 book, "Let My People Go, Cairo, Illinois, 1967 - 1973."

PERSONAL: Mr. Brown is a licensed radio operator, having qualified for Amateur Extra and First Class Radiotelephone licenses in 1959. He is active on HF, VHF, and UHF bands as K9YC. In college, he was trustee of the University of Cincinnati's club station, W8YX, and was instrumental in reactivating the club after a long period of inactivity. He enjoys listening to and recording live jazz, and has an extensive collection of jazz and classical music on LP and CD in addition to his own recordings. Mr. Brown is semi-retired, and devotes much of his time to research and teaching.

Foundational text courtesy of Audio Systems Group, Inc.