MAX-D: More Mock HD-Audio

Last summer I had the opportunity to visit a local Santa Monica-based company called MAX-D. A customer of mine suggested that I check out their proprietary process for enhancing digital audio. Their website describes the process:

“MAX-D is a proprietary audio process that restores lost compressed harmonics, and brings high definition (HD) sound to digital media. The MAX-D process can create HD Audio from a compressed audio source (MP3, AAC, etc.) while maintaining the original file size and format.”

This is the graphic that accompanies the description:

Figure 1 – A graph showing an audio waveform before and after the application of MAX-D.

So I called John Blaisure, the President and CEO or MAX Sound Corp, and made an appointment to experience it for myself. The company is located in a small industrial park just minutes from AIX. I spent a few minutes chatting with John about the company’s technology in their conference room. I explained that I was a recording engineer and producer of HD-Audio productions and was curious how their process could claim to be a “high definition audio process that literally restores all audio to high definition.”

That’s a pretty big claim. It’s kind of in keeping with the DSEE claims made by Sony to “restore” a compressed file to its “original fidelity”, only this time why bother getting back to the original fidelity…let’s skip right to high definition audio. Here we go again.

John explained that their technology guru, Lloyd Trammell, came up with this unique process. Lloyd “was voted by his peers at Electronic Musician Magazine, as one of the worlds top four audio engineers and sound designers”. John had a selection of stereo music on his DAW that he played through a small set of speakers in the conference room. There were 2 stereo pairs of tracks on the screen in front of me…one set was the original CD and the other was the MAX-D processed version. He did not tell me which was which prior to the demo. He played each of the examples alternately and finally asked which I preferred. I told him I liked the top stereo pair of the two…but I added that I knew by the sound and the visual that it was the original. I knew that the sound of the processed file had been juiced in the high and low end and made louder than the original piece. But I explained that I understood the appeal of the processed file.

When they do their “taste test” promotional segments at various locations, they claim 100% of the participants prefer the MAX-D process file. Not surprising…but it’s a trick. Everything sounds better turned up.

What MAX-D wants to do is license their algorithm to cell phone makers, chip manufacturers and software folks and get a revenue stream for the “enhanced” audio. That makes sense. But to cloud the whole issue of what is and what isn’t High Definition Audio is troubling to me…for obvious reasons. What MAX-D is doing is changing the sound quality of a source file. They are not restoring it to HD specifications.

Take a look at the graphic that included above. I have annotated the time vs. amplitude graph and present it again as Figure 2:

Figure 2 – The MAX-D diagram showing that increasing the amplitude of an existing, mastered, CD quality track is impossible [Click to enlarge]

The portion of the time vs. amplitude plot that is flat and obviously heavily compressed CANNOT BE TURNED UP as they seem to imply because all of the bits are already used up. I guess they could turn down the volume of the original and then spew out more volume, but that’s simply turning up the volume. It doesn’t put back in dynamic range. It does seem that they are using a DSP powered dynamics expander to get more range but anyone could do that.

So I captured one of their promotional videos and carefully analyzed it…I’ll post about that tomorrow.