Volume 4

Volume 4: NCTI and the Pursuit of Antinoise (1985–1989)

In 1985, shortly after I resigned from Techland Systems, I received a phone call that would define the next chapter of my life. The call was from Mike Parrella, a man I had met a year earlier at a Techland event held at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Mike had been running a company called Pilone, focused on compiler technologies, but was now in the process of taking over a failing public company named NCTI (Noise Cancellation Technologies, Inc.). He remembered our conversation and was intrigued by my perspective on emerging technologies.

Mike had partnered with Jay Haft, a high-powered deal attorney, and together they offered me a pivotal role in the transition of NCTI. My first assignment: fly to England and secure a technology licensing agreement with the University of Essex. The goal was to acquire the rights to a new patent by Professor Malcolm Chaplin — a technology that used FFT-based signal analysis to cancel periodic noise.

It’s important to clarify that Chaplin’s patent wasn’t for compression. It was a sophisticated approach to suppressing periodic acoustic or vibrational noise, such as engine hum or propeller whine. While the theoretical model was sound, it was up to us to make it practical — and marketable.

Meeting Professor Chaplin

I traveled to Essex and met with Professor Chaplin, where I negotiated and closed the licensing deal. The technology showed promise, but to turn it into a working product, we would need engineering talent capable of transforming theory into functioning prototypes. That’s when I thought of Eldon Ziegler.

Eldon Ziegler and Adaptive Filtering Innovation

Eldon was an elite systems engineer I’d met years earlier through Neil Colvin. He had led some of the earliest U.S. programming projects — including a military aircraft control system — and had recently retired from Time Warner, where he served as lead technologist. Eldon had also served on the Harvard Technical Advisory Board and once shared the dais with Angela Merkel.

At NCTI, Eldon began developing an alternative approach: adaptive filtering to cancel random noise — rather than periodic. His method, grounded in deep mathematical modeling, was novel and patentable.

One of his first demonstrations involved a platter filled with water disturbed by a transducer. Once the noise cancellation system was turned on, the water went completely still — a visually striking confirmation that our system worked. This was the same demonstration I gave during an appearance on Good Morning America.

✅ Note: Eldon’s later invention of Recursive Markov Modeling (RMM), which became critical to my AI forecasting work, didn’t come until 2019 and was not part of his work at NCTI.

Building Momentum

In 1986, John McCloy Jr. joined NCTI’s board. His father, John McCloy Sr., had been one of the most influential private citizens of the 20th century — having run the Marshall Plan in Germany after WWII and negotiated the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Jr. brought a gravitas to the company and helped arrange major financing efforts, including a promising deal with the Bank of Bermuda. Unfortunately, the 1987 market crash derailed the financing just before closing, plunging the company into a lean phase.

We continued to work relentlessly. I split my time between our offices in Great Neck and Eldon’s lab in Columbia, Maryland, commuting multiple days per week. Our efforts culminated in a series of U.S. and international patent filings, some of which now bear both Eldon's and my name.

Sales, Government Interest, and Missed Deals

During this time, I conducted technical sales presentations to military agencies, including one to the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Our demonstrations caught the attention of various branches of government and major corporations. I remember one inquiry from NASA, which asked whether we could cancel the noise from a rocket launch. In theory, yes — but practically, you’d need a “reverse rocket” to emit anti-noise at the same scale. Still, the question illustrated how far the imagination was stretching.

I also visited Germany, particularly Munich and Hamburg, where I met York Seiler, who showed me a poster-sized full-color printer he had built from scratch — in 1987! On that trip, I attended a Herbert von Karajan concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, his final performance before his death. I also visited East Berlin, a chilling and sobering contrast to the West, during the height of the Cold War.

Competition and the Market

One of the companies we paid close attention to was Bose. I met with Amar Bose himself at their factory in Massachusetts. At the time, Bose was using acoustic methods for sound suppression, not electronic. Their focus was more audio than structural. Eventually, NCTI would go on to develop noise-canceling headphones and other commercial products — years after I left the company. In the late '90s, Eldon even sent me a few working pairs. They were impressive.

Personal Rewards

From 1985 through 1989, I worked nearly full-time on NCTI. I was a central figure in establishing its engineering foundation, partnerships, and public image. I gave numerous interviews, including one for a show called Innovations on a cable tech channel. For my work, I received stock compensation, and when I sold that stock in the early 1990s, it was worth $1.5 million.

One of our U.S. patents, assigned to NCTI, still bears my name alongside Eldon’s. I even have the commemorative plaque in my home office.

This period — while intense — solidified many of the skills I had developed at Techland. It also proved that I could take a raw, esoteric technology and move it into real-world applications. It prepared me for what would come next: a move into consumer electronics with one of the most interesting and misunderstood technologies of the 1990s.