Brane Audio Technology

Technology

R.A.D.

Currently, all speakers obey Hofmann's Iron Law of Audio. This longstanding law states that speakers must be either large or draw a tremendous amount of electrical power to produce sub-bass. In other words, no speaker on the market today can be simultaneously small, efficient and produce sub-bass.

The root cause of the Iron Law is the internal air pressure variation within a sealed speaker cabinet. Deep notes require large excursions of a speaker cone/panel as it moves in and out of its sealed enclosure. These excursions create large variations in internal air pressure that must be overcome with electrical power routed to a voice coil actuator. If the speaker enclosure is small, the required amount of electrical power is large. To reduce electrical power, the speaker enclosure size must increase to lower internal pressure variations. This power and size tradeoff has limited the performance of speakers for decades.

Brane's Repel-Attract-Driver (R.A.D.) breaks the Iron Law by using a proprietary array of permanent magnets to cancel internal air pressure forces. This novel force cancellation design allows Brane speakers to be compact, efficient and capable of producing deep bass.

R.A.D. also compensates for the higher pressure of air compression relative to air expansion using asymmetrical magnetic forces. Our research shows that R.A.D. can be scaled up to concert-size speakers and scaled down for use in earbuds while maintaining an order of magnitude advantage in both size and power consumption.

SEMA

Electrostatic speakers move thin membranes between two charged plates to produce extremely detailed and directional sound. The two main drawbacks of existing electrostatic speakers are their large size and inability to reproduce bass notes. Brane's Sub-millimeter Electrostatic Membrane Array (SEMA) solves these two problems by creating membrane motion that is perpendicular to the emitted sound waves. This patented design reduces speaker size twentyfold and forms a partial baffle that enables bass notes. The required input voltage is also substantially lower due to the sub-millimeter spacing between the two charged plates.

SEMA drivers take spatial audio to the next level by beaming sound along well-defined paths and enveloping the listener in gorgeous, immersive sound. Although SEMA is not used in Brane X, expect to see it in future Brane products.

GDA

Conventional speakers are less than 1% efficient in large part because the membranes used to produce sound are much heavier than the air they move. A better approach is to use an advanced material called graphene to produce sound. Because a graphene membrane is just one atomic layer thick, it weighs about the same as the air it moves to produce sound.

Brane’s patented Graphene Drum Array (GDA) uses a small voltage between a graphene membrane and a metallic electrode to produce extremely detailed sound at high efficiency. GDA can be used to efficiently produce sound in small devices like earbuds using a membrane actuation signal that is directly proportional to the audio signal. When much higher sound pressure levels are required, GDA can be actuated at frequencies in the megahertz range and modulated to produce sound in the audio frequency range (similar to how a radio carrier frequency is modulated to produce lower frequency signals). This more complex version of GDA has the potential to reduce the size of a speaker by a several orders of magnitude. Although GDA is not used in Brane X, expect to see it in future Brane products.