Edgar Villchur, who went from repairing radios in his New York City shop to inventing ground-breaking audio equipment and hearing aids, has died, his family said Tuesday. He was 94.Villchur's daughter, Miriam Villchur Berg, said her father died of natural causes Monday at his Woodstock home.
After serving as an Army electronics officer in World War II, the Manhattan native opened a radio repair shop in Greenwich Village, where he built custom home high-fidelity sets. He moved to Woodstock in 1952, and it was while living there and teaching an acoustics class at New York University that he came up with the idea for the acoustic suspension loudspeaker, said Berg, of Woodstock. The closed-cabinet device was much smaller than the audio equipment of the era, and Villchur's invention was credited with bringing hi-fi into people's homes. His AR-3 speaker is on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
"He found that loudspeakers didn't need to be six feet tall. They could sit on a book shelf," his daughter told The Associated Press.
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