Update: watch here!

Tonight at 6:30pm Pacific Time, Keith O. Johnson is presenting a discussion for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and it is officially FREE and open for the public to register.

How Outside-the-Box Engineering Has Led to Some Clever Inventions

This talk will discuss how many clever inventions resulted from a mindset for outside-the-box engineering. Examples with technical details will be given by Keith of some of his inventions designed for or with many important inventors and projects starting with the very first Video Disk.

• The first optical video disk: with David Paul Gregg. Paul designed the disk and Keith designed the player. A key part of the success was Keith’s use of feedforward technology rather than feedback.
• Projectron: first greatly expressive keyboard instrument used in music by the Alan Parsons Project
• Instrumentation in a suitcase: with Sherman Fairchild, whose company funded Fairchild Semiconductor
• Magnetic parametric flux sensor: used by Bernard Widrow, Stanford professor in adaptive signal processing which became part of his smart pattern-recognizing memory system.
• Servo isolated open back midrange speakers. He designed this for the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound” system. Keith also worked with Ed May, the principal designer for JBL who later joined him at Gauss. 
• Space Matrix: the first immersive sound system. Developed with Jeffrey Pawlan. Used by the Eagles and the Grateful Dead.
• Lossless Magnetic Recording (Focused Gap). Bought by Gauss Electrophysics for use in their tape duplicators.
• Keith was one of the founders of Pacific Microsonics and the inventor of the HDCD system. He also designed the circuitry for their audio A/D and D/A units. Microsoft bought this company along with the rights to all patents and manufacturing.