Arthur Rupert Neve (31 July 1926 – 12 February 2021) was a British-American electronics engineer and entrepreneur, who was a pioneering designer of professional audio recording equipment. He designed analog recording and audio mixing equipment that was sought after by professional musicians and recording technicians. Some of his customers were music groups The Beatles, Aerosmith and Nirvana, and recording studios Sound City Studios and Abbey Road Studios. Companies that he was associated with included Neve Electronics, Focusrite, AMS Neve, and Rupert Neve Designs. He received a Technical Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997. Early life Arthur Rupert Neve was born on 31 July 1926 in Newton Abbot, England. He spent much of his early childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father was a missionary with the British and Foreign Bible Society. He began designing audio amplifiers and radio receivers from age 13. The start of World War II increased demand for radios and Neve began repairing and selling radios. At 17 years of age, he served in World War II, and was a member of the Army's Royal Corps of Signals. Career Neve began his career after the war as a designer of public address systems, and recorded speakers and singers on lacquer discs, including recording running addressal systems and recording prime minister Winston Churchill's speeches in the 1940s and distributing their recordings to radio stations for broadcast. He provided the public address systems for Queen Elizabeth, then a princess, at the opening of the St Andrew's Church, Plymouth, after it was rebuilt after being destroyed in the Blitz. He worked in the 1950s with Rediffusion, a forerunner of early cable TV systems. Neve left the company, and formed CQ Audio, a company specialising in the manufacture of hifi speaker systems. In 1961, he formed Neve Electronics, and began designing and building mixing consoles for recording studios. He started out by designing and building a mixing console for composer Desmond Leslie, from Castle Leslie, Ireland, where the original desk is still housed. He built a transistor-based mixing console with an equalizer for Phillips Recording Studio in London in 1964. One of his customers during this period was The Beatles and their producer George Martin. He sold his company Neve Electronics and worked with Manchester based Amtek Systems in 1975. During the 1970s, he designed a training program for missionaries to use radio broadcasting equipment. Neve worked on microphone