Bruce Jackson

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. 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. Dolby Laboratories bought the technology and formed Dolby Lake with Jackson as vice president, then in 2009 Lab.gruppen acquired the brand. Jackson was honoured with the Parnelli Innovator Award in 2005 for his inventive loudspeaker controller.

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 His wealthy parents moved to a mansion in Point Piper, a harbourside suburb of Sydney. (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.

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. 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 Ltd, in response.

Clair Brothers 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". 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. To make more room for audience seating, he also used a sound reinforcement system that was not mounted on scaffolding but hung with steel chain above the audience from overhead beams, using chain hoists rigged upside down to raise the loudspeakers from the floor—a now-common method used by licensed riggers. Presley apologised to Jackson, and he rejoined the tour as an independent engineer, answering only to Presley. He asked Jackson why the sound was not so good far away as it was up close, and if the audio crew could do anything about it. Jackson said, "we can do a lot about it", and worked with Clair Brothers to design a ring of delay loudspeakers positioned closer to the farthest seats to augment the high frequencies lost over distance by sound waves travelling through air. This made the hi-hat sound more "crisp and clean", with higher quality sound in the back row than previously experienced in such large venues. The tour was said to have drawn "unusual critical acclaim for crispness and distortion-free performances."

Jackson worked closely with individual musicians in Springsteen's band to help them achieve the sound they wanted. Keyboard player Danny Federici received attention from John Stilwell and Jackson who collaborated in modifying his cut-down Hammond B-3 organ. Clarence Clemons came to Jackson with his ideas about microphones; subsequently, the sound of his saxophones was picked up by a device invented jointly by Clemons and Jackson. Bassist Garry Tallent described the elements of his bass rig to a reporter then summed up its overall effect by saying, "the rest is up to God and Bruce Jackson."

Jackson was close to Presley, but the two men were not near in age. Springsteen was closer to Jackson's age and the two got along as friends, the singer giving a Jeep off-road vehicle as a gift in thanks for his contribution to successful concerts. Jackson said of the Jeep that he sold it after tiring of "bouncing around the place in it." The recordings made in New York City and Washington, D.C. were remixed into the album Live in Concert 2006—Jackson was listed as sound designer. Sharing sound designer and FOH mixing duties with Chris Carlton, Jackson made certain that the custom soft dome monitor wedges were positioned correctly aiming up from under the stage to cover everywhere Streisand might walk. Clair Brothers supplied 18 Dolby Lake Processors for the tour, the majority used by Jackson to tune the main sound system, and the rest for control of monitor wedges used by Streisand and by the supporting artist, Il Divo. For Streisand's voice, Jackson auditioned several wireless microphones and ended up using a Sennheiser SKM 5200 transmitter equipped with a Neumann KK 105 S supercardioid capsule. He used the vocal microphone to test the sound system from different locations around the arena. When the tour hit the UK and continental Europe, Jackson changed from a Neumann to a Røde Microphones capsule, custom made to his requirements; one that Røde called the "Jackson Special". Jackson used Millennia Media microphone pre-amps for any microphone that was required to be sent to multiple mixing consoles, such as at Madison Square Garden where cable runs to the recording trucks were long. The use of only one pre-amp prevents the microphone output from being loaded down by too little resistance which can change its tone quality.

Other artists In addition to Presley, Springsteen and Streisand, Jackson mixed concert sound for Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Barry White, Jefferson Airplane, Ozzy Osbourne, Carly Simon, Three Dog Night, the Jackson 5, Cat Stevens, Glen Campbell, Art Garfunkel, Procol Harum and Lou Reed. During 1983 when Springsteen was not touring, Jackson mixed sound for Stevie Nicks on The Wild Heart Tour, June to November 1983. Fourteen years later he mixed for Fleetwood Mac during their live performances recorded in Burbank for MTV, released as the album The Dance.

World events

In 1998, Jackson was contacted by Ric Birch of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) to mix sound for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. Jackson felt that his skills would be put to best use as organiser and audio director rather than as one man behind a mixing console. He put together a team of audio professionals as well as an equipment design composed of digital nodes linked with optic fibre to transport digital audio around the largest venues without attenuation or ground hum. To wire the spectacle which played to 110,000 people in attendance and some 3 billion distant viewers around the world, redundant systems were connected throughout so that a single failure point could not halt the show. The main loudspeakers for the opening and closing ceremonies were the KUDO model from L-Acoustics.

Following his success in Sydney, Jackson was tapped to direct the audio design and production at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he directed the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony. His sound design for BC Place Stadium did not have loudspeakers at ground level aimed up at the seating areas—Jackson determined that this approach would produce too much uncontrolled reverberation from sound waves bouncing off the ceiling. Instead, he configured two rings of loudspeakers hung from the ceiling 100 ft (30 m) above the ground, aimed downward. The inner ring held 8 arrays each composed of 12 Clair Brothers i3 line array speakers and the outer ring held 12 arrays of 7 Clair Brothers i3 line array speakers, augmented by 16 subwoofers. The lot was powered by 160 Lab.gruppen amplifiers which were also hung from the ceiling, and were networked via Dante in a triple-redundant configuration. Two DiGiCo D5 digital mixing consoles served as main and backup for the main audience sound, and two Yamaha PM1Ds handled main and backup duties for monitor mixing. Other equipment included dual-redundant Optocore fibre connections, two Dolby Lake Processors, and time code generated by two pairs of Fairlights which also handled audio cues timed to the action on the field.

Jackson directed sound for the 2010 Shanghai Expo opening ceremony, held on 30 April 2010.

Digital audio

Beginning in 1979 between Springsteen tour dates, Jackson crisscrossed the U.S. promoting the Fairlight CMI, a digital sampler made by fellow Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. (Ryrie grew up in Point Piper next to Jackson's house.) The earliest Fairlights were prohibitively expensive, and their 24 kHz sampling rate was not considered high enough for audio mastering, but Jackson found that musicians immediately discovered how useful the Fairlight was for composition. Rick Wakeman explored the sampler, as did Tony Bongiovi, founder of the Power Station recording studio in New York City. There, Springsteen was shown the sampler and said, "Ah yeah, BJ that's great, but what am I gonna do with it?" ) and started investigating 44 kHz digital audio circuits for audible problems. They found that "textbook filters" which were unnecessarily steep were protecting the CD player output from high levels of 20 kHz signals, an exceedingly unlikely occurrence in music. Initially operating out of his garage, Jackson served as the company's owner and president, and his third wife Bennett headed up sales. They demonstrated their first product at the Audio Engineering Society's 81st convention held in Los Angeles in November 1986: the 944 Series low-dispersion, linear phase, active low-pass filter, intended to replace existing filters on multi-track digital tape recorders such as the Sony PCM-3324. frame|Apogee Electronics logo Apogee's branding was largely Jackson's doing. Bennett said in 2005 that the company's decision to sell purple-coloured products was one of Jackson's ideas: "He has a good eye for design, and we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the all-black rack gear that everybody had at that point." A decade later, he warned against the belief that bigger specification numbers guarantee better sound quality. He noted that 192 kHz sampling rate was often cited as being better than 96 kHz because of it being twice as fast "when in reality there's a whole bunch of other influencing factors responsible for any audible improvements."

Jackson then joined with Dave McGrath of Lake Technology to produce a commercial version of the controller, the Lake Contour, essentially the same hardware but with different software. McGrath and Jackson acquired Clair Technologies LLC, the earlier joint venture. A collaboration between Dolby and Swedish audio electronics company Lab.gruppen was announced in 2007; Jackson's technology would be incorporated into Lab.gruppen's Powered Loudspeaker Management (PLM) system. Two years later, Lab.gruppen acquired the Lake brand for further development of the PLM and other product lines. John Carey of Dolby said, "As we pass the live sound torch to Lab.gruppen we are confident that they will continue to innovate and evolve the technology."

Pilot

Jackson was an avid pilot, licensed to fly from early adulthood. He flew often, for pleasure, one of the few concert audio engineers who did. In the 1970s between Presley concert dates, Jackson flew the singer's personal jet airliner, a converted Convair 880 named Lisa Marie after Presley's daughter. Jackson used the M20J to carry Fairlight samplers across the U.S. to demonstrate them to studios and musicians, once flying from New York to Los Angeles in 15 hours after he heard Herbie Hancock was interested. He had no flight plan filed. Following a brief stop he took off in clear, sunny weather bound for Santa Monica, but a few minutes later he crashed and died about 6.5 miles (11 km) south of the airfield in a dry lake bed. Streisand and her manager Martin Erlichman, and members of Fleetwood Mac.