Bruce Jackson (audio engineer)

Bruce Robert Jackson (3 June 1949 – 29 January 2011) was an Australian audio engineer who co-founded JANDS, an Australian audio, lighting and staging company.

He joined American touring audio engineer Roy Clair and mixed concert stage monitors for Elvis Presley in the 1970s.

With Clair Brothers, a concert sound company, Jackson designed audio electronics including a custom mixing console.

Jackson first met Roy Clair in 1970 during a world tour by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears when they stopped at Sydney for a concert held at Randwick Racecourse.

Clair had brought his unusually large American concert sound system to Australia and Jackson was curious to hear it, and to see how the big black 'W' bins were designed.

He and a friend sneaked into the concert and spoke with Clair, asking "a whole stack of questions".

Clair decided to leave his sound system in Jackson's hands for a series of Johnny Cash tour dates coming up in some six months, rather than shipping all the gear home to the USA and back in between.

Jackson stored the system and then mixed the Cash tour across Australia.

Afterward, Clair invited Jackson to visit him in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

Following a trip to London, Jackson stopped in at Clair Brothers and stayed to live in Pennsylvania.

Jackson assisted Clair Brothers by teaming with Ron Borthwick to design a mixing console that folded up into its own road case, a proprietary model used by Clair Brothers for some 12 years of top tours.

The console used novel plasma bargraph meters which displayed both average and peak sound levels, combining the characteristics of fast peak meters and slower VU meters.

Clair Brothers built 10 of the consoles, the first live sound console to incorporate parametric equalisation.

Working for Clair Brothers, Jackson toured with Elvis Presley, mixing monitors while independent engineer Bill Porter mixed front of house (FOH) for the audience.

Beginning in 1978, Jackson toured as Bruce Springsteen's band engineer for a decade, using Clair Brothers sound systems.

A business interest in Fairlight CMI in Sydney introduced Jackson to digital audio, and he subsequently founded the digital audio company Apogee Electronics in Santa Monica, California, where he lived at the time.

After selling his share of Apogee, Jackson co-founded with Roy and Gene Clair a joint venture which produced the Clair iO, a loudspeaker management system for control of complex concert sound systems.

Jackson turned the venture commercial with the help of Dave McGrath's Lake Technology.

While still a partner at Apogee, Jackson began touring with Barbra Streisand, mixing concert sound and serving as sound designer from 1993 to 2007.

With two other audio engineers he received an Emmy Award for sound design and sound mixing on Streisand's TV special Barbra: The Concert.

Jackson worked on sound design for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney and served as audio director for the opening and closing ceremonies.

Jackson was honoured with the Parnelli Innovator Award in 2005 for his inventive loudspeaker controller.

He performed the same role in Doha, Qatar, at the 2006 Asian Games and in Vancouver, Canada, at the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Bruce R. Jackson was the first of five children born to Bruce H. Jackson, Sr and Mavis Jackson, living in Rose Bay, New South Wales.

His wealthy parents moved to a mansion in Point Piper, a harbourside suburb east of Sydney in the district of Vaucluse, New South Wales.

(The mansion, "Altona", is one of Australia's most expensive homes. ) Jackson first expressed an interest in electronics at age 13 when he set up a basement workbench and small lab under his parents' mansion.

While at Vaucluse Boys' High School, Jackson was discovered by investigators of the Postmaster-General's Department, along with a group of his electronics-minded schoolmates, Phillip Storey, Wally Pearce, Bruce Morrison and Adrian Wood operating a pirate radio station "2VH", with a too-powerful AM transmitter—which the boys operated during and after school, and on the weekends, tuned to 1350 kHz in the upper end of the commercial AM band to avoid more powerful commercial radio station signals.

The boys did not know that their tube transmitter and very long, very efficient full wavelength antenna were so well crafted that their unlicensed signal was broadcasting all over Sydney and parts of the state of New South Wales 600 km away, at night time.

At age 18, Jackson and one of the boys, Phillip Storey, dropped out of university and became partners in an electronics business.

They used their surname initials to form the company name: J&S Research Electronics Pty Limited.

The partnership's largest customer, Roger Foley, doing business as Ellis D Fogg, a producer of psychedelic lighting effects, refused to write out the full company name and instead wrote JandS on his checks.

The partners added an equipment rental company with the name JANDS Pty Limited, in response.

After moving the company from Point Piper to Rose Bay, JANDS made "whatever the hell they felt like", according to Jackson: lighting equipment, guitar amplifiers and public address system components such as column loudspeakers.

He described how, with so many American servicemen stationed in Vietnam spending their recreation time in Sydney, Australian bands and clubs were doing well: "the live music scene was jumping, and we were busy".

JANDS' successful rental business paid for the design of new gear.

After two years, Jackson and Storey quarrelled and the two decided to disband the company.

They sold out to Paul Mulholland, David Mulholland and Eric Robinson, who were operating a small lighting company Jubillee Gaslight, on Sydney's north shore.

Later, JANDS grew under Mulholland and Robinson to become Australia's largest sound and lighting company.

Jackson and Storey served as consultants to JANDS, from time to time.

Dolby Laboratories bought the technology and formed Dolby Lake with Jackson as vice president, then in 2009 Lab.gruppen acquired the brand.