The Imersiv D-1 HDR-A DA converter from the American company Millennia Music & Media Systems promises a complete revolution in DA conversion. According to the designers, the S/N ratio and distortion are up to 100 times better than the best DA converters on the market. The technology, called HDR-A, promises a new frontier in audio architecture.
Millennia Music & Media Systems: pro-audio manufacturer founded in 1990
Millennia Music & Media Systems has been around for about 35 years and has its roots in the world of pro audio. The company builds, for example, the leading microphone preamplifier for Hollywood film scores (over 1,000), classical music recordings (over 10,000), acoustic jazz, foley, and much more. Millennia began as a classical music production company. Using its own recording equipment, Millennia produced over 600 recordings of symphonies, chamber music, and solo recitals, primarily in Northern California. The equipment designs spread like wildfire, according to the company. Sound engineers around the world began requesting the manufacturer to build HV-3 microphones for them. That was 35 years ago.
The design philosophy has never changed. We continue to apply the most rigorous methods to audio design and production. If a Millennia circuit (preamp, EQ, dynamics, etc.) isn’t the most accurate, neutral, and dynamically stable instrument of its kind, our designers will continue working on it until it is. It’s no surprise, then, that used Millennia products now command some of the highest resale values in the professional audio industry.
Imersiv D-1 HDR-A DAC: DA conversion according to new standards
Welcome to your future. The Imersiv D-1 DAC delivers 28 bits of true dynamic range. Current single-path DACs rarely claim more than 21 bits. But that’s misleading. Single-path DACs exhibit terrible waveform distortion at low detectable signal levels and therefore deliver far less than 21 bits of measurably clean information.
“They said it couldn’t be done. We did it. HDR-A is the new frontier of audio architecture. There’s no turning back,” the proud manufacturer proclaims.
Interesting. So how does it work?
HDR-A according to Millennia
Noise, linearity, and dynamic range are so advanced in the Imersiv D-1 DAC that modern test equipment can easily measure them. At the heart of the Imersiv HDR-A is a revolutionary new multi-path audio architecture. Multi-path music processing is to audio what HDR is to photography. The analogy is so perfect that the designers call it HDR-A, or High Dynamic Range Audio. In Imersiv HDR-A audio, multiple stacked sound levels are intelligently combined into a single audio file, resulting in significantly improved dynamic range.
Perfecting HDR-A took over a decade of continuous research and development. The graph shows how it works. Path 1 is an audio signal with a 90 dB dynamic range, from 0 dB to 90 dB. Path 2 is an audio signal with a 100 dB dynamic range, from 80 dB to 180 dB. When paths 1 and 2 are combined, the resulting dynamic range is 180 dB, from 0 dB to 180 dB. This is multi-path audio with a high dynamic range.
Multi-path HDR-A offers two key 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 approximately 40 dB lower (i.e., 100x quieter) than today’s best DAC designs. In fact, the D-1’s self-noise is 25 dB below the measurement capabilities of today’s leading test equipment, such as the APx555B.
The second advantage is unfettered headroom. HDR-A technology allows designers to increase the high-path headroom to any level without affecting the quiescent noise. The D-1 delivers +22 dBu (10 volts) of ISO-free headroom while maintaining its extremely low self-noise floor of 40 nV. This results in true wideband, unweighted linearity and a dynamic range of 28 bits or 168 dB. Multi-path is therefore the next design standard for audio architecture, from microphones to power amplifiers and everything in between.
Acoustic engineers, regardless of the type of music they primarily work with, 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 moment a note is first struck, before it reaches its peak. To quote one of today’s top sound engineers: “On the musical side, everything in the quiet zone is where we get the ‘life’ and spatial cues in a recording. Distortion of lower harmonics is the very first casualty of any acoustic recording.”
Exceptionally clean bass audio is a key reason why HDR-A topology delivers improved spatial and timbral realism compared to older single-path DACs. When audio levels fall below a certain threshold, HDR-A begins processing in a new DAC core with significantly lower distortion and noise (THD+N).
The Imersiv D-1 isn’t available in stores yet, but it has already won a prize: $25,000 in first place for participating in the Create The Future Design Contest .
Haarlem-based Helios Pro Audio Solutions will distribute the Imersiv D-1.
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