Abe Jacob

Because the school did not have the necessary equipment, Jacob rented a sound system for $150/week from McCune Sound, a regional sound company founded in 1932 by Harry McCune.

This early connection to McCune was to prove critically important to Jacob's career.

Abe John Jacob (born October 7, 1944) is an American sound designer and audio engineer.

Abe John Jacob was born on October 7, 1944, in Tucson, Arizona.

His parents were Abe Taft Jacob and Victoria Jacob (née Shaar), both of Lebanese heritage; his grandparents owned a supermarket in Tucson.

After the supermarket closed because of wartime rationing, Jacob's father and his Uncle George opened a Mexican restaurant in 1946, named Club 21, which operated for the next 73 years.

When he was four years old, Jacob was crossing the street with his aunt, mother and maternal grandmother when a car struck two of them.

His mother and grandmother were fatally injured.

Abe and his aunt Mabel survived because she ran and pulled him out of the way.

After this, he was raised by his aunt until he was 11.

At the urging of his aunt, Jacob acted very briefly in film, with a bit part in the 1951 Ronald Reagan western The Last Outpost at the age of six, and after that he performed as Tad Lincoln in a staging of Abe Lincoln in Illinois at the University of Arizona.

Jacob appeared in several children's theatre performances in Tucson, but at age nine he was done with his acting career.

Though he wished to be a musician, Jacob did not want to practice the piano, which made him realize he would never be a great pianist.

In 1955, Jacob moved with his father and new stepmother to the Haddon Hill neighborhood of Oakland, California, where he attended Catholic school classes and served as an altar boy at Our Lady of Lourdes along with his new best friend, Tom Gericke.

In September 1958, Jacob entered Catholic high school at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, while Gericke attended St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda.

Despite this separation, Jacob and Gericke continued their friendship, with Jacob recording Gericke's teenage band around 1960.

Jacob joined the audio-visual department at his school.

His first theatrical sound design role came when St. Ignatius was staging performances of High Button Shoes, The Mikado and The Desperate Hours.

Without realizing it, Jacob put together a sound system design much like those being used at the time in Broadway plays – a system based on a few Altec 639 ribbon microphones positioned as foot mics along the front edge of the stage, amplified into Altec Voice of the Theatre loudspeakers.

Graduating from high school, Jacob worked for McCune during the summer of 1962, then in September he moved to Los Angeles to enroll in college classes at Loyola Marymount University, where he earned a B.A. degree.

At Loyola, he designed sound and lights for the college's theatrical productions, and he put together his own radio show on KXLU, the college's radio station; an early evening classical music program titled Eine Kleine Commute Music.

Every summer he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for McCune.

In 1964 and 1965, Jacob worked at the Berkeley Community Theatre on Ben Kapen's summer series theatrical program known as Melodyland.

The 1965 year was different as Jacob worked the stage manager position for the first and last time, shepherding four productions: Leslie Uggams in The Boy Friend, Godfrey Cambridge in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pearl Bailey in Call Me Madam and Richard Chamberlain in Private Lives.

Bailey was such a difficult client that Jacob determined never again to be stage manager.

Jacob was finished with his college coursework at the end of 1965, but his diploma ceremony was in June 1966.

In the interim, Jacob worked at McCune.

On August 29, 1966, he was part of the sound crew at the Beatles' final concert appearance, supported by McCune at Candlestick Park.

Called the "Godfather of Sound", Jacob greatly influenced the design of sound reinforcement in modern musical theatre, and was one of the first persons credited in the role of sound designer on Broadway, with a sound designer credit in Playbill in 1971.

Jacob brought many new techniques to musical theatre, including head-worn wireless microphones, powerful concert loudspeakers with dedicated electronic processing, delayed speaker zones, under-balcony speakers, front-fill speakers, mix position in the audience, FFT analysis, scene recall, digital mixing consoles, and delay used to focus audience attention.

Jacob sparked the creation of the Meyer Sound Laboratories UPA loudspeaker, which became their flagship product.

Lighting designer Jules Fisher, Jacob's colleague on many productions, said that Jacob should have won a Tony Award in 1978 for Dancin'.

In 1998, Jacob won an Ovation Award for his sound design of Harriet's Return at the Geffen Playhouse.

In 1999, the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) bestowed upon Jacob the Distinguished Achievement in Sound Award.

The same year, Jacob received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the EDDY Awards sponsored by Entertainment Design magazine.

He never received a Tony Award, largely because the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League began giving out Tony Awards for sound design in 2008 after his career highlights.

In 2008, the USITT gave Jacob their highest award, the USITT Award, and they commissioned the organization's first audio engineering monograph, titled The Designs of Abe Jacob.

He served on the Tony Award committee from 2011 to 2014, but then the committee halted the sound design category.

In 2016, Jacob was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Live Design Awards ceremony.

In 2017, the Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association (TSDCA) granted Jacob the Distinguished Sound Designer Award.