A Path Of Innovation
Charlie Hughes started on the audio path while in high school working with local bands in Jackson, MS. He went on to earn a degree in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), specializing in acoustics under the tutelage of Dr. Eugene Patronis.
After graduating, he accepted a position with Peavey Electronics as a loudspeaker design engineer, where over the course of 14 years he was responsible for the design of more than 60 commercially successful products for the musical instrument, cinema, PA, and professional/install markets. As the primary horn designer at Peavey, he developed the patented Quadratic Throat Waveguide, one of five patents he’s been issued.
Hughes also helped to develop and implement a sophisticated multi-axis rotation mechanism to aid in the measurement of loudspeaker directivity, enabling much better data collection for modeling programs such as EASE, CATT-Acoustic, Ulysses, and PolarSum, his own proprietary MATLAB based program. that’s been instrumental in optimizing the directivity control of multi-way loudspeaker systems through the crossover region.
Among many other affiliations and educational efforts, he currently serves on multiple U.S. and international standards committees, including the Audio Engineering Society (AES), Consumer Technology Association (CTA), InfoComm, and the Internationl Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). As a result of his work on standards, he received the 2013 CTA Technology Achievement Award.
Find out more and reach him at excelsior-audio.com.
