Arvus International Limited

23th January 2025


For all of us at Arvus 2024 started on a huge high as we were excited to be delivering the H1-D in Q1 while also celebrating 40 years of business, however, as the year progressed; increasing supply chain delays and technical challenges while we were in the middle of also making complete upgrade to our internal operational systems, meant the year became ever more challenging finishing with the toughest last quarter of my business career to date.

I am personally very happy to be in 2025 and genuinely excited to be updating you all on recent positive progress.

2024 was not all challenges though, sales of the H2-4D continued to be strong, and both the AES-2H and HDMI-2A seem to consistently sell, with each now into their 13th year on market, plus development of upcoming non-digital products and new market partnerships progressed well.

The continuing H1-D challenges were not fun though, but we were recommended by many clients to continue development as the market really needs the H1-D and would do for many years. As we were undergoing many internal changes we had times where we failed to respond as required to some clients' challenges meant that not all clients had a good experience with Arvus last year. For this I would like to acknowledge these extra-patient people and apologise for the stress we caused them.

2025 is going to be a year of re-invention of Arvus while building upon the core technologies, principles and insights developed over the past 4 decades. We are thus planning to expand our team, looking for innovative engineers and people with unique perspectives on audio and how it can be applied to this exciting time of change.

Another update including some interesting personal insights on the audio industry, the new trends and opportunities will shared in early February.

Wishing you all an exciting and fruitful 2025.
Kind regards

Matthew.


H1-D Update
preparing for official release


As all prepaid H1-D clients experienced last year, the H1-D was delayed and delayed and then eventually a few units were finally shipped in Q3/Q4.

The initial firmware was limited to Dolby 9.1.6 with minimal GUI features, but people were thrilled with the build quality and loved the sound quality.

Unfortunately, two critical problems came to the fore:

1.⁠ ⁠It would not process (upscale) 44.1k content to 48k

2.⁠ ⁠The unit would not play for long periods of time without locking up. 

After thorough investigation these (and some other bugs) were due to the fundamental firmware issues in this amazing cutting-edge ADI platform. Our engineers and partners worked most of last year trying to work around these challenges but finally a decision was made that an entirely new build of firmware (with bootloader) will be required. Though this would take time it was the only way to have a 100% stable product that we could build upon and confidently get to full specification. 

This new firmware work has been done and is already proving to be the correct decision.

We have hundreds of units in stock with hardware completed waiting for new software before packaging. Once this new low-level firmware is fully tested and loaded we will have plenty of stock and the excessive delays will be a 2024 memory!

So please see the below updated schedule.


LATE MARCH / APRIL

  • All outstanding Beta Clients receive their H1-D
  • All supplied Beta H1-D's will be returned for updated bootloader and Firmware upgrade (this will be done free of charge)
  • 44.1k support 
  • Full Dolby and DTS suite support
  • 5.1 4, 7.1.4, 9.1.4 speaker configuration support 
  • AES67 support


MAY /  JULY

  • Additional CODECs support
  • Expanded GUI with Volume, Remote etc.
  • eARC support


OTHER H1-D INFORMATION
(for prepaid Beta customers)

  • We aim to meet all the original specifications on the H1-D launch document, however the Headphone feature will be the last to deploy due to time involved and complexity. 
  • The only major hardware limitation of these Beta units that we are finding is that the amount of on-board memory limits how much speaker delay we can offer. More information on this will be shared in the next newsletter
  • We still plan to support DIRAC and will honour our offer to Beta clients last year, but DIRAC will only be introduced once the product is fully featured and stable, expect end of this year at soonest.