John Ernest Benson

In 1996, Prompt Publications published Benson's 1968–1972 three part paper series on loudspeaker cabinet design, with an introduction by Don and Carolyn Davis, as: "Theory and Design of Loudspeaker Enclosures" Don and Carolyn are founders of the well-known Synergistic Audio Concepts, or SynAudCon.

Benson died in 1989 at age 78. An obituary tribute was written about him by fellow Australian loudspeaker researcher Neville Thiele in the JAES.

He designed a novel electrically tapered column loudspeaker system for the Sydney Town Hall to successfully solve some acoustic problems with the space. This design lent credibility to the team at AWA and they won a contract to design the sound reinforcement system for the new Sydney Opera House in 1960. The design once again used column loudspeakers and it won a Duke of Edinburgh prize for industrial design for both Benson and AWA in 1972.

Benson was born in 1911 and educated at Sydney Technical High School and Sydney University, earning his Bachelors of Engineering in 1934. Shortly afterward he joined the Research Laboratories of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd. (AWA). He made contributions to many areas of electronics, starting with piezoelectric crystals. After earning a master's degree in 1945, he moved on to study color television and loudspeakers in the late 1940s and 1950s. On 3 November 1948, the first Australian-produced television set was unveiled at the IRE Radio Convention. The team who created the set were Benson, H.J. Oyston and B.R Johnson, who were present at the unveiling.

Benson was editor of the AWA Technical Review journal from 1948 until 1975, when he retired. A series of papers published in Australian journals (including the AWA Technical Review) from 1968–1972 put a firm technical foundation on the electroacoustics of the era, clearly creating a single mathematical loudspeaker enclosure model that could be used to describe sealed, vented, and passive radiator enclosures, and similar types with various sorts of damping elements. Benson was the examiner for the 1972 PhD Thesis of Richard H. Small, of Thiele/Small parameters. AWA Technical Review was also the original publisher for A. Neville Thiele's 1961 papers on vented box loudspeakers. Thiele's papers were not well known until reprinted in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES) in 1971. Richard Small also published in the JAES in the early 1970s.

John Ernest Benson (1911-1989) was an Australian engineer and researcher who contributed to studies on piezoelectric crystals, television and sound systems, particularly loudspeakers.