First design sketches for the P8 and P15 |
Procella Audio - history
The
first version of the speakers that were later to become the Procella
Audio speakers, were designed in 2005 by Anders Uggelberg for the DTS
Theatre at the DTS Europe headquarters in Twyford, some 20 miles west
from London’s Heathrow airport in the Thames Valley area in
Berkshire, England.
The DTS Theatre outside London, UK
Anders
Uggelberg was then the Director of Cinema Technology for DTS Europe.
When the expansion of the DTS offices brought the opportunity to build
a state-of-the-art in-house preview cinema, Anders was asked to design
this facility. Anders is a THX trained and certified cinema designer
with a long track record as both a cinema designer and as a speaker
designer. With over 300 cinemas and professional studios to his name
and his first speaker design dating as far back as 1978, this in-house
assignment for DTS Europe was nothing short of a dream job for Anders.
Some of the cinemas and studios Anders designed:
- Sandrews ‘Biopalatset’ screen 1, the first THX approved cinema in Scandinavia
- EuropaStudios ‘THX-mix1’, the first THX approved mix room in Scandinavia
- Kinopalatsi, the first THX certified cinema in Finland
- SF Bio ‘Filmstaden Sergel’, the largest multiplex in Sweden
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The
specific requirements for the DTS Theatre asked for a medium size room
of about 30 seats, with superior audio and video capabilities from both
cinema and home entertainment sources, such as 35mm film, e-Cinema, and
movies and music from DVD, in every existing DTS surround sound format.
On top of that, the room had to be capable of taking in new
technologies as they would come along, such as the expected Digital
Cinema (DCI) standard and new optical disc formats such as HD DVD and
Blu-ray Disc.
The
first compromise that needed to be found was the type of speakers and
the layout of the speaker system. With the different requirements from
the cinema and the home entertainment side of the company, DTS needed a
speakers system that could handle both with equal capability and
prowess. As no such speaker system could be found in the market, Anders
and his colleague Gerben Van Duyl decided to design the speakers
themselves, based on the exacting requirements of the DTS Theatre.
Rather
than compromising ‘down’ to a lowest common denominator,
the design was aimed ‘up’ at the highest common denominator
between the cinema and home entertainment requirements. Taking the best
of both cinema speaker design and HiFi home speaker design, Anders
improved on both through meticulous acoustic design, careful selection
of the very best driver components, sophisticated mathematical modeling
and finally, performance testing and optimising. This design was
finalised and built by a specialist speaker factory in Sweden and
installed in the DTS theatre in the summer of 2005.
DTS Theatre, Procella speakers being installed
The
system was based around a few key principles: the use of identical
speakers for the screen channels and for the surround channels
providing 'identical voices' around the room; the use of closed box
cabinets for superior transient response and group delay
characteristics compared to bass reflex cabinets; the use of a constant
directivity waveguide and carefully matched crossovers for superior
dispersion characteristics; the use of a three way system using ideal
components for bass, mid and high; the use of professional quality,
high-efficiency drive units capable of superior dynamic range and
ultimately SPL (if so desired); the use of professional audio
controllers or Digital Signal Processors (DSP) which control all of the
audio in the room and allow very detailed fine-tuning of the acoustical
result.
As
the DTS Theatre was being built and the speakers were being installed,
Anders decided that his now rekindled love for designing cinemas and
speakers was too strong and he left DTS Europe, to start working as an
independent designer again.
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The first project that Anders designed was for the BAFTA in London,
where DTS helped implement a 7.1 system in the Run Run Shaw room. It
brought Anders and Gerben back together again as a project team, as Gerben was the
project manager for this installation.
Uggelberg and Van Duyl (who is a BAFTA Sound Chapter member) at the BAFTA install
The
successful implementation of the speaker design at DTS and at the BAFTA prompted Gerben
to start thinking about a commercially available speaker system based
on the learnings from the original design. A few phone calls later
between Gerben and Anders, and the comprehensive re-design of the
Procella Audio speaker system had begun.
In
June of 2006, the second generation Procella Audio speakers were built
and launched at the CEDIA Expo 2006 exhibition in London by the UK
distributor for Procella Audio, Pulse Marketing.
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In
September 2006, DTS sponsored a Procella Audio equipped demo room at
the HiFi News Show in Heathrow, London. The system consisted of a
Procella Extended configuration, totalling three P815 screen speakers,
six P8 surround speakers and six P15 subwoofers. After a gruelling 24
hour set-up effort by Procella, DTS, Pulse and Yamaha engineers, this
room wowed the crowds at the show. The second day a small, glass trophy
appeared in the room, courtesy of HiFi News. The system had won the
Best Demonstration In Show award.
Today,
Procella Audio Ltd supplies high quality speakers systems to
professionals and consumers around the world who want to build small
cinema rooms, preview theatres, recording studios or home cinemas with
the same exacting audio quality as the DTS Theatre.
In
many ways the Procella Audio speakers are the same as the speakers
built for the DTS Theatre. However, they are different and better as
well. The Procella Audio speakers are a complete re-design, resulting
in better cabinet designs and shapes; they are available in high
quality paint finishes and veneer finishes; they deploy better
mid-range woofers for the critical mid-range frequencies and they enjoy
many acoustical improvements, all resulting in even better audio
quality... |
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