http://www.dailynews.com/business/ci_15747512

Eugene “Gene” Czerwinski, founder of the Cerwin-Vega amplifier company and a developer of the Sensurround audio system, has died. He was 83.

The longtime Chatsworth resident died Friday at Simi Valley Hospital.

A former aerospace engineer with a degree from the University of Michigan, Czerwinski founded Cerwin-Vega in 1954 in Reseda. The company was also headquartered for a time in North Hollywood and Pacoima before relocating to Simi Valley in 1986.

Cerwin-Vega initially built speakers for home use, but Czerwinski was always fascinated with those that could handle deep bass tones. In 1957, he built the world’s first solid state amplifier and in 1964 he developed an 18-inch speaker that was the most powerful of its kind at the time.

That endeavor paid off a couple of years later with the invasion of British rock groups led by the Beatles, recalled his daughter, Connie Czerwinski, a former president of the company.

“The musicians were trying to play as loud as they could and they were blowing up speakers right and left and he was approached by (speaker companies) VOX and JBL and several others to design a really good bass speaker that would sound great and be pretty indestructible,” Connie Czerwinski said.

In the 1970s, Czerwinski partnered with Universal Studios to develop Sensurround for the movie “Earthquake.” That collaboration won him an technical Academy Award.

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Tom Young írta megemlékezésként a Gearslutz fórumon:

“So if there is an electroacoustics section in heaven, Gene must be talking bass horns with Dave Martin, pleated diaphragms with Oscar Heil and (more than likely) optimization with Dr Don. Nice thought.

I also would like to think that his coffin was finished in gray Ozite.

RIP”