Description
Welcome to the most significant audio breakthrough since digital conversion. Delivering noise, linearity, and dynamic range performance so advanced that modern test equipment cannot measure it. Imersiv HDR-A is a revolutionary new multiple-path audio architecture, poised to fully re-imagine the way we capture and deliver sound, from microphone to power amplifier, and everything in-between.
HDR-A®
You may be familiar with HDR or High Dynamic Range photography. This is an image process that dramatically increases the dynamic range of photographic light. The improvement in HDR low-level detail is stunning.
Multi-path music processing is to audio what HDR is to photography. The analogy is so perfect that we’re calling it HDR-A or High Dynamic Range Audio.
In HDR photography, multiple stacked exposures are intelligently summed into a single photo, resulting in significantly improved dynamic range. In imersiv HDR-A audio, multiple stacked sound levels are intelligently summed into a single audio file, resulting in dramatically improved dynamic range.
Realization
Perfecting HDR-A took over 10 years of continuous research and development. The graph shows how it works.
Path 1 is an audio signal with 90dB of dynamic range, from 0dB to 90dB. Path 2 is an audio signal with 100dB of dynamic range, from 80dB to 180dB. When paths 1 & 2 are combined, the resulting dynamic range is 180dB, from 0dB to 180dB. That’s multi-path high dynamic range audio.
Multi-path HDR-A offers two major advantages over traditional single-path methods. First, it significantly reduces noise and distortion (THD+N). The imersiv D-1 achieves a remarkable 40 nanovolts of broadband noise, which is around 40 dB lower — 100 times quieter — than today’s best DAC designs. In fact, the D-1’s self-noise is 25dB below the measurement capability of today’s leading test equipment, such as the APx555B.
The second advantage is untethered headroom. HDR-A technology allows us to boost high-path headroom to any level without affecting our quiescent self-noise. The D-1 provides +22dBu (10 volts) of ISO-free* headroom while maintaining its profoundly low 40nV self-noise floor. This results in a true broadband, unweighted linearity and dynamic range of 28 bits or 168dB. (*inter-sample overs or inter-sample peaks)
Multi-path is the next design standard of audio architecture, from microphone to power amp, and everything in between.
Purity
Acoustic recording engineers — whether in film scoring, classical music, jazz, or other genres — understand that spatial information is conveyed in the quiet moments: in the space between notes; in the subtle decay of a piano chord just before it fades from perception; in the brief instant a note is first struck, before it reaches its peak. Quoting one of today’s top recording engineers, “On the music side, everything in the quiet neighborhood is where we get the ‘life’ and spatial cues in a recording. Distortion of lower-level partials is the very first casualty of any acoustic recording.”
Extraordinarily pure low-level audio is a key reason why HDR-A topology delivers improved spatial and timbral realism compared with legacy single-path DACs. When audio levels drop below a certain threshold, HDR-A begins processing in a new DAC core — with dramatically lower distortion+noise (THD+N) performance.
