Feb 11
1
Tribute To Bruce Jackson
It must be one of those weeks.
This morning I got a skype message from my friend, Ervin, in San Francisco, to tell me the sad news that Bruce Jackson had died in a plane crash in Palm Springs over the weekend.
Bruce was one of the legends of the live sound business in Australia – and worldwide.
As a young man, still at school, Bruce was a mad tinkerer with electronics. He build amplifiers and broadcast transmitters in his bedroom. He experimented and invented and discovered… And he built from the ground up what was to become the largest sound re-inforcement business in Australia – Jands. He sold that and moved to the USA and became the front of house sound man for Elvis Presley. That put him in the orbit of the Clair Brothers who supplied sound re-inforcement for Elvis, and that led to Roy Clair investing in a business that Bruce started to build to create a new digital platform for speaker management.
That was when I met Bruce. Bruce was close friends with David McGrath, one of the founders of Lake Technology, and they were busy inventing together. Lake bought the company from Clair Brothers, and we brought the Lake Contour to market in about 2004 and it revolutionized live sound speaker management because it introduced efficiencies theretofore unimagined.
Bruce continued at Lake after the sale of the company to Dolby. But I think that when the speaker management side of the business was sold, because it wasn't producing enough money, I think that he must have become somewhat disappointed.
Bruce's other big passion was flying. He had had a pilot's license for probably over 30 years and owned his own plane, that he kept in Santa Monica. I flew with him back and forth from Santa Monica to San Francisco on numerous occasions. And as I was saying to Ervin, when he told me the sad news this morning, I often used to think to myself as I boarded the plane….”only one engine on this thing… I hope we don't have engine trouble up there…” We never did. But apparently something went wrong for Bruce over the weekend.
Sad to see you go, Bruce….