Richard W. Burden was elected an SBE Fellow in 1999. In April, SBE awarded Burden with its Life-Time Achievement Award - only the seventh time the award has been given to an individual in the society's history.
Richard W. Burden, CPBE of Canoga Park, CA, was presented April 19 with the Society of Broadcast Engineer’s (SBE) Life-Time Achievement Award at the SBE annual spring membership meeting in Las Vegas.
The occasion marked the seventh time in the society’s 41-year history that its Life-Time Achievement Award had been presented.
Dick became SBE member #450 in 1966 and was an original member of SBE Chapter 1 in Binghamton, NY. He helped organize Chapter 47 in Los Angeles, serving as its second chairman and as program chairman from 1979-1981. He is a Senior Member of SBE and was elected an SBE Fellow in 1999. Dick earned his SBE Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer designation in 1990 and he continues to serve Chapter 47 as Certification Chairman.
His career started as a student at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where he was appointed chief engineer of college radio station WJRH in 1950. He transferred to RCA Institutes to study Radio Broadcast Engineering and graduated in 1952, holding a 1st Class Radio -Telephone License.
In 1952, he was appointed to the Signal School in Fort Monmouth, NJ as a civilian instructor. Dick was assigned to the Armed Forces Radio Service in New York as staff engineer and was released from active duty with citations as a staff sergeant in 1955.
He was employed at General Precision Laboratory for five years doing circuit design of audio-video and pulse modules, technical writing for video systems and engineering on the Air Traffic Control System for the Federal Aviation Administration.
In 1960 he formed Burden Associates in Mount Kisco, NY and in 1972, opened an office in Canoga Park. Burden Associates is still in operation.
In 1958, Dick worked on the development of a system of stereo broadcasting in conjunction with Multiplex Development Corporation and is a holder of a patent in that field. He also served on the Ad Hoc Committee for the Study of Television Sound (ACHSTS); as a member of the Broadcast Transmission Systems Committee (BTS) on the study of Stereophonic Sound of Television; and as a member of the National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC) working toward improvements in Radio Broadcasting, from 1990 –1994.
Dick served as AES Los Angeles Section Chairman from 1989-1990 and as Western Region vice president of AES in 1992-1993. He became a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society in the 70s, having been selected as one of 25 people who had made significant contributions to the industry over the last 50 years.
For more information, visit www.sbe.org.
