Ora Graphene Audio Inc. is a Montreal-based startup that engineers advanced nanomaterials for the audio industry. Their team works with the exciting properties of graphene, the strongest and lightest material known to man, to deliver smaller/lighter, more energy-efficient speakers, all while remarkably improving sound quality.
The company’s acoustic experts and materials scientists have dedicated the last few years developing GrapheneQ, a patented material with a rare combination of high stiffness, low density and great damping factor, making it the ‘holy grail’ material for loudspeaker membranes.
While Ora launched a very successful crowdfunding campaign for a premium pair of headphones featuring their proprietary graphene membranes, the technology has also caught the attention of the biggest consumer electronics brands, already engaging Ora to develop solutions for their devices. There are three main reasons why GrapheneQ has audio engineers excited:
1.New levels of fidelity
The high stiffness of graphene means that an acoustic membrane won’t distort as it is pushed back and forth, pushing ‘speaker breakup’ to supersonic frequencies.
2.Reduction of power consumption
Loudspeakers are incredibly inefficient. Less than 1% of the power from an amplifier is actually converted into sound. The low density of graphene means that it takes less energy to move the membrane, allowing for significant improvements in the battery life of wireless audio devices.
3.More Volume/Smaller Devices
The low density of graphene also translates to higher sound pressure levels (SPL), enabling audio engineers to design smaller/louder speakers.
To date, other than GrapheneQ, there have been very few cases of graphene enabled applications hitting the market where the vast majority of the product’s content (95% in Ora’s case) is actually graphene. In fact, Ora not only developed an ideal material for the audio industry, they also established and patented an innovative manufacturing technique, which is easily scalable, yields membranes at commercially viable costs, and allows for the formation of the material into complex geometries with very high precision.
Given the natural fit between GrapheneQ’s near-term potential and the pain points associated with acoustic transducers, Ora expects their technology to be adopted across audio categories extremely rapidly. Whether they be headphones, portable speakers, televisions, hearing aids or even smartphones, all audio transducers today could benefit from the killer mechanical properties that GrapheneQ provides.
