Neville Thiele

In 1991, he was appointed Honorary Visiting Fellow in the University of New South Wales, and from 1994 to 2010 was an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he taught part-time in the Graduate Audio and Acoustics Program of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning.

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. After acting Director of Engineering Australian Capital Territory, responsible for engineering at the ABC’s radio and television studios in Canberra, he was in 1978 appointed Assistant Director Engineering New South Wales (TV), responsible for engineering at the ABC’s Gore Hill television studios in Sydney. In 1980 he was appointed Director, Engineering Development and New Systems Applications, where he was responsible for the ABC’s engineering research and development until his retirement at the end of 1985.

Joining EMI (Australia) Ltd., Thiele 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. Appointed Advanced Development Engineer in 1957, he was responsible for applying advanced technology in EMI Australia’s radio and television receivers and electronic test equipment.

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 interested in the reproduction and transmission of sound. After five years of war service in infantry and the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (AEME, subsequently Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) in New Guinea and Bougainville, he graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical and Electrical) in 1952.

Albert Neville Thiele, OAM (4 December 1920 – 1 October 2012), was an Australian audio engineer. Thiele was born in Brisbane, Australia. He was particularly noted for his work on electronic filters and on developing the Thiele/Small parameters for characterising loudspeakers as an aid to loudspeaker cabinet design.