In early 2011 I was having a conversation with a senior engineer at DEQX as we had partnered with them on the Hypacoustic installation atLaser Pacific studios in Hollywood. I let him know that we had recently completed development our AES/EBU to HDMI digital audio converter and he said "you know what would be very cool?...to make a box that works the other way!"
From that simple idea we decided to explore the need for such a device. We found that de-embedding 8 channels of HDMI audio was a genuine need for the gaming industry as game soundtracks were being produced with such varying loudness levels that companies like Sony and Microsoft were spending too much time on making the audio levels normalized.
Later that year Sony Entertainment UK commissioned the first order of our HDMI-2A, and over the next decade the HDMI-2 became an essential device for hundreds of the worlds leading gaming, music, TV and film post-production studios. Thank you Alan & Garry.