Marcel Urban
Physicist and Wavefront Sculpture Technology co-author
Major contribution
Marcel Urban co-developed the Wavefront Sculpture Technology criteria for coupling discrete loudspeakers into line-source arrays for sound reinforcement.
Urban’s documented contribution to live sound is his collaboration with Christian Heil on the acoustic conditions needed for line-source arrays. Their work addressed interference between individual loudspeakers and the coverage of audiences by arrays of discrete sources.
The journal paper co-authored with Heil and Paul Bauman uses Fresnel analysis to explain source coupling and variable-curvature arrays. It revisits their 1992 AES work; these are collective research contributions rather than evidence that Urban alone invented the modern line array.
Key work
- Line-source coupling AES research (1992)
- “Wavefront Sculpture Technology,” JAES (2003)
- Variable-curvature WST criteria (2003)
In the chronology
Selected sources
- Wavefront Sculpture Technology* · l-acoustics.com
- LINE ARRAY Q&A · secozvuk.cz