John Prohs, FAES, Principal

John is responsible for the firm's overall management and all project assignments receive the benefit of his widely recognized expertise.

He has provided solutions for spaces as diverse as the Denver Colorado Convention Center; major airports and shopping malls in the Middle East; eBay trading room; Wynn Las Vegas show room; Mid Bedfordshire District Council Chamber in the U. K.; Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in Los Angeles; and numerous other spaces small and large.

His distinguished career evolved from direct practical experience engineering video and running sound reinforcement systems early on to designing audio-visual systems for use by others.

Practical Experience

John was responsible for approving and overseeing the design and installation of the technical systems for the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. The auditorium was used for many network Television specials and drew the top artists in their field, including the late Vladimir Horowitz, the Vienna Symphony, Luciano Pavarotti, and Pearl Bailey. Several major artists considered Ambassador their favorite Hall.

Patent Worthy

He then formed and headed an R & D group while continuing to serve as a technical consultant to Ambassador Auditorium. He motivated his team to develop a wide variety of technical solutions including color video distribution on standard telephone lines. John also was granted several international patents for the interactive telecommunications call extending system known as SwifNet ®. In 1990 the system was a finalist for the prestigious Computerworld Smithsonian Business Award.

Scientific Innovator

But a major part of his innovative work has been focused on sound clarity with emphasis on speech intelligibility. He developed a prototype time-gated spectrum analyzer pioneering the way for instrumentation used to measure the clarity of sound in a facility.

He was awarded a patent for a fully three dimensional distortion free loudspeaker array mapping system. This was the basis for one of the first effective computer applications for predicting loudspeaker coverage and sound intelligibility known as “The PHD Program ™.  He also helped write the program itself.  Numerous audio professionals, worldwide, utilized the program for designing and, though the interface has not been updated for the current Windows operating systems, it is still used in some audio design situations.

John has authored or coauthored several technical papers involving intelligibility issues for the profession’s Audio Engineering Society.

Before forming his own company, John was with an international technical consulting firm heading its sound reinforcement systems research activities, modeling and auralization studies, and serving as its lead audio systems design consultant.