DEQX HDP-5™
DEQX’s flagship HDP5 is a new concept pre-amplifier that adds touch screen display and Internet connectivity to HDP4’s reference loudspeaker and room calibration features. Like its predecessor, HDP5 provides transparent analogue pass-through and superb DAC performance while correcting measured errors in loudspeaker performance and compensating for room acoustics.

HDP5 delivers a range of scenarios targeted to your requirements. For example ‘Room Calibration’ delivers great results using simple measurement techniques if you’re happy with your loudspeaker performance. ‘Loudspeaker Calibration’ uses more detailed measurements of your speakers. This is used for detailed phase-response and frequency-response correction, particularly for midrange frequencies where correction is particularly beneficial to restore realism. In both cases your dealer or our on-line DEQXpert installer service ensures great results.

Numerous input options include state of art USB:
With HD-Audio sources increasingly available to your PC or Mac music server, HDP5 comes with a high definition USB input that’s received highest accolades from professional and audiophile reviewers. It utilizes a dedicated DSP to re-buffer and re-clock data to ensure a jitter free source. This feeds directly to HDP5’s Dual-DSP calibration engine without conversion to-or-from S/PDIF.

Six additional inputs include digital S/PDIF Toslink optical, S/PDIF BNC and RCA, AES/EBU and analogue XLR balanced and RCA unbalanced. Analogue inputs utilize Cirrus Logic’s reference ‘professional’ ADC (Analogue-to-Digital converter) to provide absolute transparency for analogue sources such as vinyl preamps, analogue sources and surround receivers. A phantom powered DEQX-Calibrated measurement microphone is also provided.

Remote and tone control with a difference!
The remote provides volume, input selection and DEQX’s 3-band ‘forensic’ tone control with 99 memories. The three bands have adjustable frequency and Q (bandwidth from semitone to four octaves wide), while the ‘center’ band is fully parametric spanning all frequencies. Applications include specific media EQ, low volume listening and personal preference settings. Four ‘Profile’ settings can also be selected, each allowing different speaker and room calibrations to be stored from DEQX-Cal setup software (with PC connected at time of setup) for instant recall.

Touch screen and Internet:
HDP5’s attractive 4.3” touch-sensitive intelligent display is driven by a 1GHz ARM CPU to allow future Internet connectivity and software upgrades. The touch screen has several display pages for customized control options including volume, analogue metering, selection of input source, and calibration and EQ profile selection.

First do no harm:
Transparent audiophile quality throughout is provided by dual SHARC 32-bit floating-point DSPs providing greater than 140dB resolution followed by three Burr-Brown 32-bit DACs. Ten separate power-supply regulation stages deliver extremely low measured distortion and jitter for fatigue-free listening.

Need more bass?
It’s not easy to add subwoofers to audiophile speakers and guarantee great results – until now. A popular way of configuring DEQX’s active crossover options is to simply add one or two subwoofers to existing speakers. All can be calibrated and time aligned with room calibration.

Going ‘active’ option:
HDP5 also offers full 3-way active crossover features not offered by sister products PreMate and PreMate+. Upgrade your speakers to another level of performance now or in the future using HDP-5’s ‘HD-Active’ crossover outputs that introduced a new generation ‘active’ speaker regime. The three sets of ‘active’ outputs; bass, mid and high, drive separate amplifiers each for bass, mid and tweeter drivers. Choose the best amplifier suited for bass, mids and high frequencies. For example, a priority for bass is high power. The midrange driver need moderate power but good detail. While Tweeters may only need 10 watts of rich detail where even tube amps and A-Class amps are affordable.

Professionals have used ‘active’ speakers for decades because they deliver high dynamics with lower distortion and greater accuracy than passive speakers. HDP5 new generation ’HD-active’ regime improves on traditional analogue and DSP active crossovers with steep linear-phase crossover filters that incorporate individual driver calibrations. This preserves each driver’s linearity, or native resolution, by better quarantining frequencies to its ‘comfort zone’.

Thinking DIY?
DIY speaker design was never like this! HDP5’s 3-way active crossovers allow active 2-way speakers to be integrated with subs, or 3-way speakers can be implemented actively using custom designs or upgrading existing passive speakers to active. HDP5 and its DEQX-Cal software provides the same measurement features that the best speaker designers use – so you know exactly what’s going wrong. What speaker designers can’t do but DEQX can, is directly compensate what’s going wrong so that what you ‘hear’ is as close to the original source as possible.

DEQX-Cal is half a million lines of software designed by DEQX’s award winning engineers over fifteen years. It provides DIY’s with a risk free environment where numerous design options can be instantly auditioned and compared. Save months of traditional speaker design work where results will outperform traditional techniques. Use our DEQXpert on-line service for DEQX-Cal DIY tips and training, or we’ll do it for you.

DEQX technology - realizing HD-Audio
DEQX’s patented, very low latency convolution processing corrects speaker frequency-response and timing errors by adjusting thousands of frequency groups, depending on your speakers’ measurements, so that they not only arrive at the correct volume, but also on time. Going further, DEQX’s HD-Active regime offers hope of achieving a playback environment that comes closer to actually hearing the content of new HD media. Today’s loudspeakers remain passive and uncompensated, dating from the same era as CRT TVs.

As a result, today’s so called ‘HD-Audio’ is akin to watching an HD BluRay video on a twenty year old CRT Screen. Yes it will look slightly better, but inherently limited by the resolution and accuracy that CRTs can fundamentally deliver – we needed new technology HD-displays and projectors to ‘get real’. With loudspeaker distortion around 1%, to name just one alarming parameter, its resolution is limited to 40dB, whereas the amplified signal driving the speaker is closer to 80dB and typically more.

Consider ‘HD-audio’s amplified signal driving our loudspeaker; its phase-response and frequency-response is decimated by it – at the least. In other words, frequencies do not arrive to our ears either at the right volume or the right time specified by our recordings. Taken to full implementation DEQX addresses all of these issues directly and indirectly.

The timing coherence accuracy that DEQX restores is often the most expensive design feature of loudspeakers. Normally, loudspeakers have no way to compensate errors via the signal driving them; so expensive engineering is used to minimize these errors and distortions. DEQX uses real computing horsepower to make that happen with essentially zero distortion and minimal processing delay so audio remains in sync with video.
The good news is, when it comes to ‘HD-Audio’ - we ain’t heard nothing yet!

We’re DEQXperts
A DEQXpert agent can run the comprehensive DEQX Cal™ software for you on a secure, remote connection for a surprisingly affordable price. You’ll need a simple USB link to your PC (or Mac running Windows) using a measurement microphone and a broadband connection.

Or, if you prefer to calibrate it yourself, we can lend a hand via email or phone with tips and directions on getting the best from your setup.