Albert Neville Thiele OAM BEng (1920 - 2012)

Born 4 Dec 1920 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Ancestors

Died 1 Oct 2012 at age 91 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Neville Thiele OAM BEng is Notable.

Albert Neville Thiele OAM BEng, generally known as Neville Thiele and publishing under the name A. Neville Thiele, was a distinguished Australian audio engineer and Second World War veteran.

Formative years

Born Albert Neville Thiele on 4th December 1920 at Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, he was the firstborn child of Hermann Thiele and Maude Rasmussen, and the older brother of noted Australian actor and narrator, Leonard Teale. Thiele was educated at Milton State School, Brisbane Grammar School and the Universities of Queensland and Sydney.

After performing on Brisbane radio stations as a boy soprano in the early 1930s, and later as an actor, he became intensely interested in the reproduction and transmission of sound.

Military service

Neville Thiele OAM BEng is a Military Veteran.
Served in the Second Australian Imperial Force 1942-1946
15th Australian Infantry Battalion; Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

On 4th February 1942, immediately after the news of the fall of Singapore and capture of almost the entire 8th Australian Division, Thiele enlisted in the Australian Army, whereupon he was posted to the 15th Australian Infantry Battalion. Transferring to the Second Australian Imperial Force, he was assigned to the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (AEME, subsequently Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), with who he served in New Guinea and Bougainville. He subsequently served throughout the Second World War, being discharged on 2nd August 1946. ^[1]

Career

The war over and returning to some semblance of normality, Thiele undertook studies, graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical and Electrical) in 1952.

Joining EMI (Australia) Ltd., he was employed as a design engineer on special projects, including telemetry. With the start of television in Australia, he spent six months of 1955 in the laboratories of EMI at Hayes, Middlesex, and associated companies in Scandinavia and the United States, and on return to Australia he led the design team that developed EMI's earliest Australian television receivers. Thiele joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC, subsequently Australian Broadcasting Corporation) in 1962, where he was engaged as Senior Engineer, Design and Development in designing and assessing equipment and systems for sound and television broadcasting. He retired at the end of 1985.

He published forty journal papers on electroacoustics, network theory, testing methods and sound and vision broadcasting; some of which have become accepted internationally as references on these topics.

Marriage

Thiele married Lexie Anderson in 1953 at Sydney, New South Wales. ^[2] They had two children, Laurence and Miranda.

Awards

• 1952 Bachelor of Engineering
• 1970 Norman W V Hayes Medal
• 1979 Audio Engineering Society fellow
• 1992 Norman W V Hayes Medal
• 1994 Silver Medal of the Audio Engineering Society ‘for pioneering work in loudspeaker simulation’
• 2003 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award ‘for major contributions to the synthesis and analysis of loudspeakers’
• 2003 Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the 2003 Queen’s Birthday honours ‘for service to audio engineering, particularly in the field of loudspeaker design and the development of audio engineering standards’^[3]
• 2008 Doctor of Science in Architecture (honoris causa)
• 2009 Peter Barnett Memorial Award by the Institute of Acoustics (UK) ‘for technical excellence, practical advancement and education in the fields of electroacoustics and speech intelligibility’

Final sound check

Neville Thiele passed away on 1st October 2012 in Sydney. His obituary stated: "Loving husband of Lexie, father of Laurence and Miranda, father-in-law to Leia. Proud grandfather of Daniel, Lexie, Jodi, Charlotte, Sigrid, Tania and Melinda. Great-grandfather of Kristen and Arwen." ^[4]

Sources

1. ↑ Australian War Memorial nominal roll: Craftsman Albert Neville Thiele; accessed 9 Feb 2019
2. ↑ New South Wales Marriage Index #20988/1953
3. ↑ Australian Honours: Albert Neville Thiele OAM; accessed 9 Feb 2019
4. ↑ Sydney Morning Herald; THIELE, Albert Neville. 04.12.1920 - 01.10.2012 A Lifetime in Sound

See also

• Wikipedia: Neville Thiele; accessed 9 Feb 2019