Having celebrated its 40th birthday last year, Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW) convinced Co-Founder and former VP of Strategic Engineering, Kenton Forsythe, to rejoin the company.
“When I left three years ago, I took a year off, and my wife and I worked on our ‘honey do’ list—and we’re still working on that,” Forsythe joked. “But I want to make more speakers. A couple of years ago I started looking around, but I didn’t find the right situation. Then EAW President, TJ Smith, gave me a call. EAW is pursuing some advanced product development, and TJ asked me to contribute.”
Although Forsythe is not returning full time, he is back as a consultant to the company. “I kind of reclaimed my role as the transducer guru,” he explained. “Our head of engineering, Geoff McKinnon, is excellent, and he provides the leadership and vision. I collaborate with suppliers on component designs as well as new product development concepts, working with and under Geoff and Director of Product Management, Jeremy Forsythe.”
Forsythe noted that EAW’s current ownership brings benefits not available to the company in the past. “Now we’re owned by Arturo Vicari, who also owns RCF and db Technologies, which opens a new toolkit,” he explained. “We operate independently but are part of a group of companies, and the technology can be shared amongst the groups. RCF also has really good components that are now available to us. So we have resources we didn’t have previously.”
As an EAW Co-Founder, Forsythe links the company with its past, but his return is intended to focus on the future. “We’re not getting the team back together,” he clarified. “We are assembling a new group of much younger people who have the energy and the passion that we brought to it 30 or 40 years ago. We’re trying the stretch the boundaries of what can be done with the technology, and we’re working on new products that are going to knock your socks off.”