Burwen Richard
 Dick Burwen has been an audio enthusiast for 70 years. After graduating from Harvard College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1950, he worked as a circuit designer for several companies. In 1961 he quit his job at Honeywell to become a full-time consultant, working at home until now for more than 60 companies. He designed circuits for equipment that included airborne, seaborne, audio, video, cable TV, automotive, industrial control, medical, detection, space vehicle, laboratory instruments, function modules, and integrated circuits. Among his achievements are: equipment and layout for the second cable TV system in the USA, a Noise Eliminator system providing 110 dB dynamic range for tape, a magnetomer that successfully measured the magnetic field of the moon from orbit, and now audio software involving patented high frequency reverberation. He has been granted 14 patents.
The op amps in his home audio system became the foundation for semiconductor manufacturer Analog Devices. He was also a founder of Copley Controls Corp, manufacturer of servo amplifiers and switching gradient amplifiers for MRI systems up to 1,000,000 VA.
As a consultant Dick helped Mark Levinson with the first products of Mark Levinson Audio Systems and Cello LTD’s Audio Palette. Millions of National Semiconductor DNR chips licensed under Dick’s patents appeared in car stereos and other products. Dick’s home was built around his 20,000 watt, 169 speaker system hi-fi, now almost finished after 46 years. Partial retirement in 2002 enabled Dick to work 60 hours/week for more than 8 years on audio signal processing software to improve the sound of his home hi-fi, and these software applications incidentally became professional and consumer products. Read about his sound system, audio software, and a detailed biography, at www.burwenaudio.com and www.burwenbobcat.com. |
Burwen Richard
The development of artificial reverberation in the audio industry has been aimed at duplicating the sound of real rooms, more and more accurately. No one ever considered the possibility of developing reverberation more desirable than real. Richard Burwen discovered that your ears really like to hear the high frequencies missing in room reflections above 5 kHz. Their most important characteristic is not the spatial and echo effect, but thousands of peaks and valleys in the frequency response that tend to ‘clean up’ high frequencies in the music. Signal processing to achieve a wiggly frequency response having a carefully tuned trend can greatly extend the potential of an audio system and program material for realistic reproduction. This article discusses the thinking behind the system and explains the various processing options. Example sound files with different processing are available on-line at 
