LAS VEGAS – The Parnelli Awards Board of Directors announced that Kenton Forsythe will receive the Parnelli Innovator Award, honoring his influential career in the pro audio industry. Forsythe will receive his Parnelli Award at a gala dinner on Saturday, Oct. 29 at the Peabody Orlando.
"It has been said of him that there is not a professional audio engineer out there today that doesn't touch something Kenton is directly responsible for," said Terry Lowe, Parnelli Awards executive producer and publisher of PLSN and FRONT of HOUSE magazines. "He is a true innovator, and we are honored to honor him at this year's Parnellis."
In 1975, Forsythe and Lew Freedman formed Forsythe Audio Systems to sell his SR215 dual 15-inch bass design horn, the first in its class to be optimized to fit through a 30-inch door. In 1977, he added two-way compact systems and a vented subwoofer system with an interchangeable tube venting system, allowing the enclosure to be able to be reconfigured with various drivers. In 1978, a new version of the company, EAW, debuted at the AES show that year and dazzled the industry with the SR109 and BH212. In the late 1980s his KF850 became the number one touring box in the world.
"Anyone who has worked in pro audio knows Kenton's extraordinary loudspeaker designs," said Ted Leamy of Pro Media/Ultrasound, a Parnelli board member. "His development of the KF850 made an affordable and powerful loudspeaker system available to hundreds of regional and international sound companies. This single development changed the way business was done. The industry as a whole is indebted to him for his prolific work."
In the 1990s, Forsythe was there with solutions for stadiums that needed huge audio systems for more than spoken words. Today, more than 50 percent of U.S. stadiums have one of his systems installed. He's personally responsible for scores of technological advancements and important products during his career. Even at the most recent InfoComm show, he demoed three new series of loudspeakers.
Forsythe was born in Boston in 1944 and grew up in the nearby town of Sharon, MA. In the 1950s, like so many kids of the area, he developed a curiosity for the "hi-fi" systems of the day and tinkered with them, making them better. He went to Yale, originally to study physics, but switched to American and Asian history, the latter of which would come in handy. His first career was in city planning, but Forsythe was still the go-to guy among his friends to build home sound systems. Inspired reading the classic book How to Build Speaker Enclosures, his hobby would turn into his day job, and in 1974 he joined a company called Delta Sound, which was a JBL distributor.
"Growing up in Framingham, MA and later attending UMass, Amherst, I've been blessed to use Kenton Forsythe's speakers my entire life," says FRONT of HOUSE editor Mark Frink. "Later, working for Herb Mayer's Sun Sound Audio in Northampton, I was lucky to be in on the ground floor for EAW's collaboration on the KF-850 and its phenomenal success."
"It was a total surprise," Forsythe said of the Parnelli honor. "These days I just consider myself so fortunate to have an amazing crew of people to work with, and now I'm honored to receive [the Parnelli]."
For more information, please visit www.parnelliawards.com.
