ABSTRACT
One of the founders of the Audio Engineering Society, in 1948, LeBel was also the society’s first president. He earned a degree from MIT in 1926, and went on to obtain his master’s from the same institution in 1927. His first job was as a research physicist at Raytheon, from 1927 until 1929, where he worked on lamps and rectifiers. After Raytheon, he worked at Sylvania from 1929 through 1932, where he worked on lamps and ozone tubes. In 1937, his growing interest in audio systems helped him to found Audio Devices, where he was chief engineer and was active in the development of lacquers used for the machine production of recording discs. During this period, he also worked on the development of high-grade recording tapes. In 1940, he became vice president of the company, a position he held (with a five-year sabbatical hiatus to work for the Maico Company, doing hearing-aid research) until his death. From 1945 through 1946, he also worked as a project engineer at Cambridge Instrument, and went on to found still another company, Audio Instrument, in 1947. LeBel was also a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers. He had a profound impact on the audio technologies of the era and his influence has been honored at MIT with a teaching position called the C.J. LeBel professor of engineering.
