User:Binksternet/Danley

Thomas J. Danley (born 1953) is an American audio engineer, electrical engineer and inventor, the holder of multiple patents for audio transducers, especially high-linearity, high-output professional loudspeaker systems.

Early life and career
Danley was raised in the northern area of Illinois, around Highland Park. His father and brother were inventors; Danley studied mechanisms by taking them apart, and he learned to arc weld at age 11. He attended Deerfield High School. He later said, "I took every shop class there was, but I had an attendance problem and math was my weakest thing." One of his friends from mechanical drawing class was T.C. Furlong, who later became an equipment manufacturer and event production company owner.

After high school, Danley began working at Steamer Sound, the audio production company founded in 1973 by Furlong. Danley designed loudspeakers for the company, and for individual musicians such as keyboardist Joan Gand. In 1974, he brought a reel-to-reel tape recorder to the Alley, a nightclub in Highwood owned by Furlong, to record the sound of the John Burns Band (the son of Jethro Burns) as he mixed their set. Danley was amazed when he listened to the tape after the show; the tape held a wider frequency range, a higher fidelity experience than was heard at the nightclub performance. He realized that the loudspeakers must have been a significant limiting factor.

Danley also worked as an electronics technician. One of his employers was Data Specialties in Northbrook, where he first used a computer – a Commodore VIC-20 – to write a program to perform the math calculations he needed at work.

Intersonics
In 1979, Danley started working for Intersonics, a contractor to NASA, supplying hardware for rocketry research. Danley invented many devices while at Intersonics, obtaining 17 patents. The inventions include a high-powered acoustic levitator, a sonic-boom generator used by BBN Technologies, and a massive Flow Modulator loudspeaker system used by Georgia Tech Research Institute and NASA for vibration tests on rocket payloads.

Servodrive subwoofers
When Danley asked permission to create a subwoofer product based on the servo drive, Intersonics president Roy Whymark said yes, but only if the effort did not interfere with Danley's other responsibilities.

Danley Sound Labs
Danley partnered with entrepreneur Mike Hedden in 2005 to form Danley Sound Labs, a loudspeaker company based in Gainesville, Georgia. For the first ten years of the company, Danley contributed design ideas while continuing to live in Illinois. In 2015, he moved to Georgia.

Audio consultant
Danley has consulted on acoustic issues for various projects. He appeared in the documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx to demonstrate acoustic levitation. Danley was an early adopter of the Crown Tecron TEF (time-energy-frequency) audio analysis system, introduced in 1983, and he used a TEF-10 portable test rig to measure his audio experiments. In the 1990s Danley used a TEF-12 analyzer to assess the acoustics of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

Personal life
Danley has played bass guitar since high school. He was in several bands in the 1970s.