The Story Behind Brane Audio

The Road to RAD

The founders of Brane Audio didn't come from audio. Their careers were built in clean energy systems, material sciences and magnetics, not speakers. Unknowingly, that outsider's perspective was their advantage.

Instead of accepting the tradeoffs every engineer in audio had learned to live with, we approached the bass-to-size problem like an energy efficiency challenge. How do you get more output without burning more power or adding more size?

Over 30 years of electro-mechanical research shaped the Repel-Attract Driver (RAD), which is the most significant advancement in audio driver technology in over a century.

It Started Long Before Brane Audio

Joe Pinkerton is the CEO and cofounder of Brane Audio and a serial entrepreneur whose companies, from Active Power to Clean Energy Labs, all came back to the same two ideas: energy efficiency and magnets.

In 1992, Joe founded Active Power, a company focused on clean energy backup power systems. The company developed novel magnetic bearings that would eventually inform development of the RAD. He led the company through a successful public offering and stepped down as CEO in 2006.

Afterward, he founded Clean Energy Labs in 2007, a research lab where he assembled a core team of scientists and engineers. The group conducted advanced graphene research at the University of Texas nanotechnology lab, exploring new applications for energy efficient materials.

From Graphene to Sound

While working on membrane switches, the team discovered something unexpected.

Graphene membranes could efficiently produce sound. That breakthrough opened a new direction for the company and they began applying advanced materials research to audio.

Brane Audio was established in 2015, from this early focus on membranes.

Over the next five years, the team developed two speaker models built on a novel submillimeter electrostatic membrane array, known as SEMA. The plan was to debut the technology at SXSW in March 2020, but the event was canceled due to COVID.

During quarantine, the team paused and reassessed the future of the company. Rather than refining an incremental improvement, they asked a bigger question: what was the most fundamental limitation in portable speaker design? The bass response.

Joe returned to the themes that had defined his career, energy efficiency and magnetics. That reflection sparked the concept that would become the Repel-Attract Driver (RAD), after many iterations.

The Breakthrough: RAD

RAD changed what was possible in a speaker. By overcoming the fundamental air pressure forces that limit conventional drivers, it broke a tradeoff that had shaped speaker design for nearly a century. Deep bass no longer had to mean bigger or more power-hungry systems.

Breaking Hofmann's Iron Law

For nearly a century, speaker design has been constrained by Hofmann's Iron Law. The principle states that a speaker can only achieve two of the following three qualities: small size, high efficiency, or deep bass.

In practical terms, deep bass has always required either a large enclosure or enormous power consumption. Deep bass was essentially exclusive to much larger and/or expensive audio setups.

RAD breaks that tradeoff. The original technology had a ten-fold advantage, meaning it could produce 10x the deep bass, at 1/10 the size and power consumption of a traditional subwoofer.

From Breakthrough to Reality: Brane X

Brane Audio's flagship product, Brane X, became the first portable speaker with a true built-in subwoofer. Weighing under 8 pounds and running on up to 12 hours of battery, it was able to hit notes as low as 27.1 Hz.

The Brane X debuted at CES in 2023 and quickly stood out, despite Brane Audio being an unknown audio brand at the time. Listeners were surprised by how dramatically the Brane X outperformed other speakers in its size class. It earned the top spot in Wirecutter's Best of CES 2023, and then received a TIME Best Invention of 2024.

The Evolution: RAD2

Brane X proved that RAD could overcome the tradeoffs that had defined portable audio for decades. RAD2 takes it further.

RAD2 keeps air pressure cancellation and adds a solution to the second force that limits deep bass: the inertia of the moving panel. Every driver spends energy speeding up and slowing down its moving mass. RAD2 cuts that cost by tuning its resonant frequency to match the music in real time. At resonance, the spring and mass forces cancel, so the driver needs very little power to move. If a track plays a 25 Hz note, RAD2 tunes itself to 25 Hz.

RAD2 also added a new magnetic design, an improved launch system, and lower moving mass, delivering 30x the deep bass output per unit of size and power. That means bass down to 20 Hz, much longer battery runtime, and a design that scales easily across product sizes.

RAD technology can be compared to the flat-screen TV moment in audio. Like the transition from tube TVs to flat screens, RAD technology enables a new generation of speakers that are smaller, more efficient, and capable of significantly better performance.

Just Getting Started

Brane Audio is now exploring what else it can make possible.

From new form factors to entirely new categories, Brane Audio is building a future where deep, powerful sound can go places it never could before. And making existing audio solutions more compact, bassier, and more energy efficient.