Ari Pinkas  0:00  

My name is Ari. I'm the co-founder of ORA Graphene. And I'm here to tell you how my company merged two disciplines: material science and acoustics to create a breakthrough audio solution for some of the biggest brands in the world. For over 100 years, audio engineers have sought the holy grail material for this little guy, the cone, the actual part of the speaker that pushes air back and forth and produces sound. What is this holy grail that they've been searching for, and have never found until now? Surprise, surprise, a very rigid material, we want the speaker cone to move back and forth without deforming a very lightweight material, we want to move that cone with at little energy as possible, and we want it to be very well damped so that when the signal stops, the loudspeaker also stopped. And like I said, engineers, audio engineers, have not been able to find this yet. And I can prove this through trustworthy Wikipedia, who says in practice, all three of these criteria cannot be met simultaneously using existing materials. Thus, driver designs involve trade offs.

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Ari Pinkas  1:20

Enter GRAPHENEQ, a material that was developed at ORA that is over 95% graphene oxide, no substrates. And it hits the trifecta: it is rigid, it is lightweight, and it is very well damped. Apart from that it is formable. We're able to form it in typical shapes that are traditional for audio applications. And of course, probably our biggest feat, yet it is scalable. And we have proven that over the past month or so, moving facilities and now pumping out around 60,000 headphone membranes per month. And we're doing this for a variety of applications. There's a lot of loudspeakers out there, from your phone to your laptop, VR, auto, smart home, and really what excites me about being part of this company is that we can really bring different value to different applications. So that's what I want to talk to you about is how we can bring and can take advantage of these mechanical properties, which are very rare combinations to do some really exciting stuff. And I'll start with sound quality

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Ari Pinkas 2:41

And I want to do a case study here with gaming audio. We are launching our first product with a major consumer brand, and should be announced in Q1 2022. A gaming headphone. And I think it's a good case study because for gaming sound quality is very important and actually gives an edge to gamers. What can we do there ? We can provide better reaction times and we can localize components much easier if somebody's shooting you from here rather than from here. The Gamer wants to know that. We are very strong in the high frequencies, which means that we can communicate and our intelligibility between players is much stronger than anything out there. We completely eliminate distortion, which means less listener fatigue, more playing time, and we can have a wider soundstage, so when you put these headphones on, you will notice that the sound is coming from much wider than just speakers shooting sound to your ears. And this is how we do it really the intelligibility of the communication, and that precision comes from the stiffness. The cone as it moves, it completely maintains its shape. And the stereo imaging, the fact that it's so wide, has to do with the well damped characteristics of graphene. And there you go, we've compared this to many drivers. And overall our headphone drivers surpass anything that is out there. There's many materials people use aluminum, it is very stiff, but it is not very heavy, not lightweight. Some people use paper, which is very light, but not stiff at all. So we found this trifecta, and we don't only hear it as an end user, but we can also objectively see data that shows us that we're better.

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Ari Pinkas 4:44

Better sound quality isn't always just about hearing better sound. We can do a lot of things with extending the frequency response and I wanted to touch on two projects, we're doing with two brands. One is a smart speaker company and the other is a company that makes sound bars. And what we're doing for these guys is not so much a play of improving sound quality. It's more about improving sound quality to the point that you reduce components. So we can create cones that right now, as you see there's, cones that take care of the low frequencies. And there's cones that take care of the high frequencies. If we create a cone that is high performance enough, we can eliminate the need for a tweeter. That means no crossover, no tweeter, and basically a reduction in design complexity and of course, a reduction in cost for the brands.

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Ari Pinkas 5:44

We're also ultra efficient, and I'll talk quickly here. You probably don't know this, but loudspeakers are one of the least efficient technologies that we still use today. It is less efficient than incandescent light bulbs, which are outlawed in many places in the world. And we're taking advantage of this. Titanium and aluminum are very heavy, takes a lot of energy to move back and forth, and they're in a lot of Bluetooth products. With our technology, we swapped the aluminum with graphene and we can extend the battery life just by that replacement by up to 50 to 70%. We can also take advantage of the efficiency for loudspeakers in cell phones, laptops, and tablets. And what we're doing there is one of two things we can either create a loudspeaker that is the same size, but much louder. Or we could take it the other way around, we could keep the same loudness over the speaker and create a speaker that is much smaller, so that a company that sells cell phones could put a bigger battery in there, more cameras, whatever they want. 

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Ari Pinkas 6:49

Overall, audio loves graphene. But what's next? We've developed a manufacturing facility that is the leading, I would say, we're the leading manufacturer in graphene oxide membranes. And we've also become experts at formulations. And we want to use this expertise to address some of the biggest problems in the world. 57 billion worth of electronic materials disposed of in the landfill. We want to use our manufacturing process to reinvent the PCB lifecycle. We want to replace the fiberglass of PCBs by putting graphene in there, and then, instead of throwing it away in a landfill, you can dissolve it in water and either recuperate the non dissolvable components, or you could recycle the non disposable components. My time is up guys. So if you have questions, let me know! Graphene loves audio. We're going to tackle audio. We're going to hit that vertical first, but then we're going to use our manufacturing process to do more future applications that should help us save the world a little bit. Thank you so much!

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