Trinnov has announced that it is now shipping all Altitude surround preamp/processors with HDMI 2.1 boards, manufactured by Cypress Technology.
According to the company, due to HDMI 2.1’s significant upgrades compared to HDMI 2.0, it took its time and care to implement the new upgrade kits for those looking to upgrade their existing Altitude units, which will become available in late January 2024. For upgrading Altitude16 processors, certified dealers can field-upgrade units that currently have a Cypress HDMI 2.0 board installed. All Altitude32 and Altitude16 processors with older MDS HDMI 2.0 boards must be sent to Trinnov for the upgrade. These upgrades are expected to take approximately two weeks to complete.
In mid-December, a firmware upgrade, version 4.3.2, will enable the HDMI 2.1 board’s feature set. Note that this new VMX-H8K-8201 board provides two HDMI 2.1 outputs with identical capacity and the EDID priority set to output 2. Trinnov Audio points out that all features available on the current Cypress HDMI 2.0 board are also included, except the down scaling feature on HDMI output 1.
HDMI 2.1 Refresher from Trinnov Audio
Looking back, in an ambitious move, the HDMI consortium announced the HDMI standard in November 2017. However, it has taken board manufacturers several years to meet the high bar for performance and features required within the HDMI 2.1 specification. This new board provides most of the HDMI 2.1 feature set that includes:
- Fixed Rate Link (FRL)
- Increased bit rate to 40 Gbps from 18 Gbps in HDMI 2.0
- Due to the unavailability of HDMI chips supporting 2 outputs at 48Gbps, the board is limited to a maximum of 40Gbps.
- High Frame Rates – HDMI 2.1 supports up to 120fps at 4K and 60fps at 8K
- Dynamic HDR, allowing for frame-by-frame HDR
- Enhanced gaming features such as Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Automatic Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
- HDCP 2.3 Input / Output (across all 8 inputs and 2 outputs)
