Founded in 2006
“The benefit for Australian and NZ customers is that one of the original founders of Procella is right here in Sydney, ready to help you design your home cinema or professional cinema.”
Mareor, Sydney
2002
DTS Europe
2005
DTS Theatre
2006
Procella launches
2026
Belgium and beyond
Origins
Procella Audio and Mareor were both founded in 2006 by Gerben Van Duyl.
Procella Audio is the cinema equipment design and manufacturing company, then based out of Stockholm, Sweden, and was founded together with business partner and head of design, Mr Anders Uggelberg.
Mareor was founded in Sydney as the import and distribution company for the Procella Audio products in Australia and New Zealand.
“The benefit for Australian and NZ customers is that one of the original founders of Procella is right here in Sydney, ready to help you design your home cinema or professional cinema.”
The DTS Theatre
Uggelberg and Van Duyl met as colleagues at DTS Europe in London, in 2002. Uggelberg was Director of Cinema Technology and responsible for the roll-out of the new DTS cinema technologies that later became part of DCI. Van Duyl was Director of Consumer Content Development and as such responsible for market penetration of the DTS audio formats on DVD and later Blu-ray Disc.
Those new developments – DCI and Blu-ray Disc – required the build of a new DTS reference cinema that would allow the testing and demonstration of the DTS technologies in their full capacity. This is when Uggelberg and Van Duyl started working together to create something special: the very first 96/24 capable cinema in the world. And that cinema needed better loudspeakers.
The combined loudspeaker requirements were nothing short of revolutionary:
• Studio quality audio
• THX cinema reference level SPL
• Superior dynamic range and impact for that jump-out-of-your-seat effect
• Equally good at dialogue, music, and effects (DME), the three pillars of every movie sound mix
• Unequalled clarity that allows every detail to be heard in full DTS 96/24 audio quality
• Complete lack of distortion and listening fatigue
• Perfect dispersion of all audio frequencies “to all seats in the room”, for perfect immersive surround sound audio
Design principles
With these requirements from the cinema and the home entertainment side of the company, DTS needed a speakers system that could handle all with equal capability and prowess. As no such speaker system could be found in the market, Uggelberg and Van Duyl decided to design the speakers themselves, based on the exacting requirements of the DTS Theatre.
Uggelberg 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. 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 modelling and finally, performance testing and optimising. He finalised his design, and the loudspeakers were built by a specialist factory in Sweden, and installed in the DTS theatre in London in the summer of 2005.
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’ throughout 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 waveguides and carefully matched crossovers for superior dispersion characteristics; the use of three way systems 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; 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 and calibration of the acoustical result.
Launch and recognition
As the DTS Theatre was being finalised 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.
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.
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 loudspeakers were built and launched at the CEDIA Expo 2006 exhibition in London by the UK distributor for Procella Audio, Pulse Marketing.
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
Fast forward 20 years to 2026 and Procella Audio has grown to a sizeable company, complete with new investors and management in the persons of Ignace Rombauts and Wim Buyens (both ex Barco and Cinionic), and many new colleagues. Procella manufacturing has also relocated to Belgium, right in the heart of the EU. Both Uggelberg and Van Duyl remain shareholders in Procella Audio.
Today, Procella Audio supplies high quality speakers systems to professionals and consumers around the world who want to build professional cinema rooms, 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 loudspeakers are now a complete re-design, resulting in better cabinet designs and waveguide shapes; they deploy better mid-range and high-frequency drivers, and they enjoy many acoustical improvements, all resulting in even better audio quality.
On top of that, Procella has branched out into video solutions, in the form of our combined Immersio LED video wall products and our Above Screen loudspeakers. You can learn more about this on our Products page
“In mare irato, in subita procella, invoco te nostra benigna stella” — Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638)
