Björn Erik Edvardsen RIP

It's been reported on the Strata-gee consumer electronics news website that Björn Erik Edvardsen (known as BEE), who was the creator of the historic NAD 3020 integrated amplifier, passed away on December 16 from Myeloma/bone cancer. BEE had worked continuously with the company from 1976 until just a few months ago, when he left his position as NAD's Director of Advanced Research to focus on his battle with cancer.

Edvardsen joined NAD in 1976 as its first engineer and second full-time employee after founder Marty Borish (who died in 2017), working out of NAD's London, UK headquarters, which is where I first met him. I have a memory from one of the many conversations I had with BEE over the past 40 years that before joining NAD he had worked for Tomlinson Holman during the development of the classic APT preamplifier, but the Google fails to confirm that.

A sad ending to a year that also saw the passing of Aretha Franklin, Hugh Masakela, David Wilson, Siegfried Linkwitz, Wally Malewicz, Richard Shahinian, Decca producer James Mallinson, and Sony's Yoshihisa Mori.

COMMENTS
Cooking Man's picture

Sad to learn of his passing. My first “proper”amplifier was a 3020 bought in 1983 (along with a “biscuit tin” Systemdek) from KJ WestOne,London.What a super amp. It survived all the abuse that a heavy metal fixated student could throw at it and is still in service today providing excellent stereo audio in my AV setup. Thank you Björn.

Pablo,London

Allen Fant's picture

Thank You for sharing- JA
I like the BEE series of CD Players- very good sound quality.

T-NYC's picture

... was chief engineer at Grace for many years before joining Sony. He succeeded Ikeda-san who left in 1963 to pursue moving coil designs by founding Fidelity Research. Grace and Denon were selected by the NHK to produce high-quality phono cartridge designs that were purely Japanese. Yoshi-san and his fellow engineer from Denon spent almost a year in the NHK labs; then the most sophisticated in Japan. Incidentally, they bonded and remained lifelong friends. Yoshi-san developed the F-8 MM cartridge which was the basis of all subsequent Grace designs (Denon released the DL-103 as the result of this NHK research); the F-8 Shibata version was the first available CD-4 cartridge. At that time Grace produced the largest portfolio of tonearms of any firm anywhere, however Yoshi-san designed the G-707 tonearm specifically for CD-4 use, optimally used with a F-8F cartridge. He also developed the G-704 tonearm specifically as a replacement for Grace customers using older 100, 200, 300, etc series tonearms. Yoshi-san moved to Sony, leaving his lifelong friend and assistant, Hiromu Meguro, as Grace' chief engineer. Hiromu-san developed the F-9 and G-727 among other products before moving to Nakamichi. Today, Hiromu-san is responsible for the Top Wing cartridges which are essentially cost-no-object perfections of the Grace MM designs. Yoshi-san had a distinguished career at Sony, designing both their best MC cartridges (often OEM to famous audio firms BTW), headphones, and was part of SACD development. He later taught engineering at university, and continued his product development career as a consultant into the beginning of 2018. He was a man of great and elegant engineering insight, and great warmth, humor and spirit. He is missed by family, friends and colleagues.

hilzer's picture

Hey John!! Thanks for making me quit as your AD so I could get back to my first true love--no, not Robert--but Native American arts, I should say Indigenous arts. I went on to be the AD for Native Peoples magazine for ten years before its sad passing. Your parent company would've made much better decisions than the founder/publisher--altho' I loved the guy for starting it.

Nice to see you guys are still around. I often think of our days in Santa Fe (AKA Adobe Disneyland as Aural Robert liked to call it). That man always had a way with words--you should hire him. LOL!

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