Dr. W. Marshall Leach died last weekend.
Dr. Leach was a beloved professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. He specialized in analog electronics, which happens to be the area of electronics that is well suited for audio systems, and so he taught a course on audio systems design. 
Of course sound systems are of great interest to college students of all stripes (matched only by the subject of cars), so that was a very popular course. His Leach Speaker design and Leach Amp design have taken on their own lives on the internet, and countless people have built their own. Seriously, talk to any audio electronics engineer in the country and they not only know who Dr. Leach is, they revere him.
I first met him through my involvement at WREK. I was an aerospace engineering student (at first) so didn’t have any classes with him; I probably met him at the station during one of his occasional visit to check out his gear. He had designed an audio compressor to be used in the WREK air chain (an absolutely critical component) and would come by to tweak it occasionally if he’d heard something offensive in our signal (no, not the programming, the actual quality of the audio signal).
When I returned to Georgia Tech to get my second degree, in electrical engineering, I pretty much made a beeline for Dr. Leach and signed up for his course. I did take the famed audio systems course, which actually spends most of the class time on speaker cabinet dynamics, because that’s where the rubber meets the road in audio systems and where systems usually squander their quality. But I also decided to make analog electronics my specialty (we had to pick one such specialty from a palette of about a dozen), mostly because it seemed like the “classic” EE field but also likely inspired by Dr. Leach.
I ended up taking a few courses taught by Dr. Leach, and I just loved his style. By this time I’d learned how to be a student (it only took me 3 years), meaning A) always show up for class, B) pay attention and C) ask questions if you don’t understand (which you can really only get away with if you do A and B). Dr. Leach was patient and always well-tempered, but I could see him quietly bristle when some idiot student would ask a stupid question. Or worse, a student trying to talk his way out of poor performance on an exam. He simply did not suffer fools when it came to exam time, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you’d get eviscerated on the exam scoring. But the thing is, if you did A/B/C above, the exams were easy! I remember turning one exam in after 30 minutes (in a 50 minute exam) and quietly asking him “this seems too easy, am I misunderstanding?” and he grinned and assured me that it was in fact an easy set of problems.
His handwritten lecture notes have to be worth their weight in gold. Having visited his office many times, I had seen the carefully assembled looseleaf notebooks that he had honed over decades of teaching his courses. And if you hung out long enough, he’d let you wander into his huge audio lab, reached exclusively via a side door in his office. Amazing.
But the best reason to visit Dr. Leach (and the door to his corner office was usually wide open) was his sense of humor. He was constantly chuckling at something, often Institute or ECE bureacratic nonsense. And who is going to poke fun at Dr. Brewer now?
I graduated with my EE degree in 1996, but I stayed in Atlanta, and whenever I visited the Georgia Tech campus and was passing near the EE building, I’d climb the stairs to the 3rd floor and stop by his office for a chat. Always the same mischievous grin, that flushed red face, the white shirt or sweater, the relaxed lean back in his desk chair.
Be sure to take a look at the guest book at Dr. Leach’s funeral home to get an idea of how beloved this man was. I recognize some of those names — they were WREK students in the 1960s and 1970s, and are now wildly successful electrical engineers, VPs, CEOs, entrepeneurs.
A couple years ago I wrote here on the passing of Bill Sayle, another EE prof. To be fair, I barely knew Dr. Sayle, although he did make a decision that had a critical effect on my life. Dr. Leach I knew far better, and I’m glad I did.
I will miss those campus detours to his office so much. RIP, Dr. Leach.
I asked a student once why he spent so much time with Dr. Leach and he told me he just felt better after talking to him. So did I.
– Tom Brewer
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A few links worth checking out:
Georgia Tech press release on the passing of Dr. Leach
details on the memorial event scheduled for December 16th
Dr. Leach’s collection of links on his home page at Georgia Tech, including the impossibly thorough and entertaining page of “audio related things“. See also the speaker and amp design pages linked above. His attention to detail yet easygoing manner courses through these documents.