Henry Kloss, the inventor of innovative audio and video components who became a hero to audiophiles, has died at 72.
His son, David, said Mr. Kloss died Jan. 31 in Cambridge, Mass., of a subdural hematoma.
Mr. Kloss was rewarded by an almost cultlike devotion from those who bought his equipment and who followed his career through many companies and twists of fortune.
An engineer educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Kloss began to build his reputation in 1952 while working at Acoustic Research.
He created a small revolution in listening when he invented the AR-1. It was the first speaker that was small enough to fit on a bookshelf but could produce rich, deep bass tones.
It was only the beginning of a career of firsts. In the 1960s, at KLH, a company he co-founded with Malcolm Lowe and J. Anton Hoffman, Mr. Kloss made the Model 8 FM radio. It could pick up stations from a crowded dial, a feature that came to be known as high selectivity.
He also created some of the first successful audio devices to use transistors. He moved on to found Advent, where he created the first cassette tape deck to use the Dolby B noise-reduction system.
Then he set his sights on video and designed pioneering projection television equipment.
When Mr. Kloss decided to serve as the eyes instead of the ears, however, he foundered.
Although his systems earned an Emmy for technological achievement, he lost control of Advent and then of a company that he had formed to sell the televisions, Kloss Video Corp., as consumers chose less expensive models.
Mr. Kloss returned to audio in 1988 with a company he named Cambridge Soundworks.
In the venture, Mr. Kloss turned to a surprising sales method: mail order.
His reputation for providing high-quality sound at reasonable prices was so well established, he reasoned, that customers would be willing to buy loudspeakers without first hearing them, on the basis of his reputation and strong reviews for products like multispeaker home-theater systems.
The strategy was successful, partly because the company was able to keep costs down by avoiding the expense of maintaining a network of stores.
Mr. Kloss left Cambridge Soundworks after selling it in 1997 to another company, Creative Labs.
He was not ready to retire, however.
In 2000, Mr. Kloss unveiled an elegant tabletop radio, the Model One, from yet another company, Tivoli Audio.
Once again, the Kloss faithful marveled at the rich sound from the small wooden cabinet, which was designed with just three knobs: a large, smooth-gliding tuning dial, another to adjust the volume and the third for turning the radio on and off.
