 So we're here at the HDMI booth and as part of the HDMI 2.1, there's an eARC support, some new smart surround solutions, so hi, so who are you? Hi, I'm Ed Seim from Simplay Laboratories. eARC is the new enhanced audio return channel. It builds upon the original ARC from the HDMI 2.0 in previous days. Original ARC was about one to four megabits a second and eARC is up to 40 megabits a second. What's the main return channel? What happens is a video goes into your television and you want to get the high bitrate and other audio out of your television to your AVR or your soundbar and using the new eARC, it allows you to get much higher bitrates out of your television back to your soundbar. Does that work over the regular optical cables or something totally different? Is it new speaker systems? The work worked across either SPDIF, TOSLINK or an HDMI cable back channel. Now we are exclusively across the HDMI cable. And does that mean in the future people will be able to position their speakers in any sized room, anywhere, and then somehow there's like, is there a microphone that detects the calibrates or how does it work? How do you calibrate the room to get perfect surround? Does that help with that? You know, eARC is actually just a transport mechanism for high bitrate audio. It's actually agnostic to things. It supports up to 32 channels of uncompressed, but it also supports compressed, most notably the Dolby Digital Plus, True HD and DTS Master. Since we're bitstream agnostic, if there are new uncompressed or compressed standards in the future, it also handles those. And what this allows you, the 32 channels uncompressed, there's a standard for that that will put the speakers many places, but it's not specified on how they will be utilized. So for example Dolby True HD is a 7.1, and perhaps even higher than that, a 9.1, 11.1 or 2, and that the bitstream will just flow through the television to the AVR or to the soundbar, be decoded there in the Dolby ATMOS system to the soundbar, and then some of the speakers will point towards the ceiling and come back down, and so you can mimic surround sound without requiring necessarily rear speakers or rear height speakers. Is there some collaboration to be done with that? Is that something else? That would be part of the Dolby or the DTS and how they would do things like that. There's nothing, we don't do any microphone calibration of sound or anything like that. That's not really part of the standard, but we don't preclude it, but it's not part of the standard. What is part of the standard that hadn't been there, in the past there was a lip-sync as part of ARC, but it was never really implemented. Now there should be a lip-sync that is part of a mandatory portion of the... That means every remote of the HDMI 2.1 televisions will have a menu system where you can go and screw it back or forward the video based on the audio? That's presently what some televisions are trying to do to correct for lip-sync. Maybe there'll be some secondary sub-menus that you'll go to and try and have a slider bar and correct the audio as you perceive it to be incorrect. But now, with ERC, the television manufacturer should measure the video pipeline in the television and then send that video delay information to the sound bar and the sound bar can correct automatically. If you change from, say, a gaming mode to a theater mode, the television can then send the new updated lip-sync information and it should do it automatically on the fly. This is the Simply Labs box right here. What goes on in here? What we have here is this box is basically a piece of test equipment for mimicking either a transmitter or a receiver. And using it, we can send control streams that mimic proper and as well as bad behaviors as specified by the HDMI specification. So return means the TV sends HDMI out back to the speakers or something? Correct. So if you had your hybrid-rate audio or any other audios that are inside the television, say from a set-top box, if you have it connected directly to your TV, how do you get the good sound out of it? So the HDMI output? Correct. You know, normally the speakers on a big screen like this probably aren't as going to be as good as what you can get from a sound bar, certainly not as good as what you'll get from an ABR. But this is a way of getting more than standard PCM out and get some real amplification going. So it would be interesting to get the next level of sound experience and that's going to be, that's now a standard bar part of the HDMI one. Correct. This is evolutionary. So we go from 4 megabits to 40 megabits and there's also a new signaling scheme. This now uses the two pins that were repurposed that were originally part of the HDMI 1.4 with Ethernet. Those same two pins from Ethernet have been repurposed for the audio return channel. Alright. So there it is. And many companies work with Simplay Labs? Yes. Simplay Labs is both an authorized test center as well as a manufacturer of equipment. So when companies incorporate new features and need them certified, they can send them to Simplay Labs. We have test centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, United States, Taiwan and... What was headquarters? Hillsbrough, Oregon.