Transistor Museum Historic Profile Richard Burwen Index

Richard S. Burwen

Transistor Museum Historic Profile

Recognizing Significant Contributions to 20^th Century Semiconductor History and Technology

Curator’s Introduction

For over 60 years, Dick Burwen has been actively involved in the electronics industry, with noted accomplishments in the field of audio circuit design. Since building his own amateur radio station (W1NMG) as a youth in the 1940s, Dick’s prolific career has paralleled the growth of the semiconductor industry and his work has been particularly influential in melding the worlds of semiconductor electronics and high performance audio equipment. The list of Dick’s impressive professional achievements includes the following :

· Over thirty historic audio and electronics publications

· Substantial body of audio and electronics patents

· Renowned electronics and audio consultant

Dick continues his groundbreaking work in audio electronics with the recent release of Burwen Audio’s latest commercial product, the Audio Splendor™ tone control and ambience generation software package. This product highlights a half century of career achievements in audio design, encompassing the range of technology from vacuum tubes, germanium and silicon transistors, integrated circuits and modern computer software.

Notable Contributions

Above: Dick’s article in the Dec 1963 volume of Electronics World provided a definitive and timely assessment of the capabilities of transistor electronics and hi-fidelity audio. Quoted from this article: “Mr. Burwen specializes in audio and transistor circuitry and was responsible for the design of several high power transistorized hi-fi amplifiers…”. Dick summarized his assessment as follows: “Thus, transistors right now can produce higher quality than has generally been available from tube amplifiers.”

At Left: Shown is a photo of Dick Burwen standing in front of the speaker system for his famous home studio 20,000 watt solid state HI-FI system. The listening experience provided by this unique system is unparalleled.

More Notable Contributions, Page 2

20,000 Watt Audio System

TRANSISTOR MUSEUM™ HISTORIC PROFILES – RICHARD S. BURWEN PAGE 1

Recognizing Significant Contributions to 20th Century Semiconductor History and Technology

Recognizing Significant Contributions to 20^th Century Semiconductor History and Technology