Since March 2016, he has served as a consultant to the radio industry from his longtime home base of Atlanta. Before launching his own business, he spent 16 1/2 years at Cumulus Media, most of that time as SVP of Corporate Engineering and IT.
Now, Gary Kline is being mourned, as news of his passing surfaced on January 11.
Kline’s experience in radio dates to January 1982, when he served as a broadcast engineer for NBC Radio following an internship. In 1985, he would accept a similar role at ABC News before joining Raycom Sports in a freelance capacity in fall 1990 for a six-month role as its network engineer for Purdue University men’s basketball broadcasts; it resumed under Learfield IMG College in 1997. From 1991-1998, Kline served as Corporate Director of Engineering for Artistic Media Partners.
However, for the past seven years Kline was known across the industry for his Kline Consulting Group, which came following a reorganization at Cumulus. The focus: audio processing, studio design, RF, optimization, and enterprise services.
At Cumulus, Kline led a significant IT upgrade of stations in Atlanta acquired from Susquehanna Radio. He also built one of the first radio broadcasting facilities to use fiber optics to connect studios to a centralized router.
“Visualized radio,” a top of discussion today among many in the radio industry, was also pioneered by Kline. He’s also been a podcast engineer and has worked as a consultant with such companies as Benztown.
Kline, who was believed to be in his early 60s, was raised in Queens, N.Y., and was raised on such distant AM powerhouse stations as WOWO in Fort Wayne, Ind., and the original CKLW at 800 kHz in Windsor, Ont., Canada.
An exact date of Kline’s passing was not publicly shared; it is believed he died of cancer.
