In 1967 Paul Taylor was given five years to live by his doctors so, aged 59, he decided to retire.

In 1972 he received a call, out of the blue, from Canon Carpenter, Dean of Westminster, who was a friend from his teenage years. Westminster Abbey were experiencing increasing problems with their poor acoustics, especially during big events which were broadcast. A sound advisory panel had looked at various current technical solutions but without success. Canon Carpenter remembered the work Paul Taylor had done for St Paul’s Cathedral twenty years earlier (the famous “gunshot” experiments) and asked for his help. Paul Taylor was by no means sure he could help, as he had no recent experience of sound systems or how acoustics had developed in recent years. However, he thought that it would be the perfect antidote to his continuing chronic ill-health, which left him house-bound in winter. It would be good therapy to read up on his old subject and see whether a new solution could be found. Typically, he ended up patenting two new inventions (No 9883/72 in 1972 and No 6217/75 in 1975) both relating to carefully-phased linear loudspeaker arrays. He gifted the commercial benefits and financial proceeds to Westminster Abbey’s Dean and Chapter. Paul Taylor was made a Fellow of various professional bodies and was President of the Society of Environmental Engineers in 1973, of which he was a founding member.

Paul Taylor eventually died in 1980 aged 72.

His son, Nick Taylor founded his own very successful Public Relations company, Harvard PR, which was eventually sold to Lord Tim Bell’s Chime Communications PR company.

Edgar Lavington had found Pye politics increasingly tiresome and he resigned from Pamphonic in 1959.

From 1960 until his death, Edgar worked as a Management Consultant – at first collaborating with a city firm of receivers helping ailing companies to re-trench.  Then in 1963 Edgar took a managerial interest in the electrical component company Repanco Ltd. of Coventry (the famous maker of radio coils) .  By September 1964 he had put some of his own money into Repanco and had become joint Managing Director.  In the end this proved to be a difficult assignment: his co-Director died in 1971 and the successor had a nervous breakdown.

Edgar Lavington finally died in 1982 after a long battle with cancer, three years before Repanco finally closed down.

His son Simon Lavington is an emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, and an eminent computer historian.