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Audio Pixels is “anything but ordinary”. That’s what the company told investors in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange as it reported a modest $26 million loss.
The speaker technology play had completed two out of the four phases of its plan and while everything was in place, the demonstration platform was not quite at the stage where the company could unveil this “revolutionary technology” to the public.
Today that statement is 10 years old.
Fred Bart, chairman of Audio Pixels Holdings. Kirk Gilmour
Remarkably Audio Pixels, chaired by Fred Bart, continues to fuel the hopes and test the patience of investors with updates about breakthroughs and setbacks along their inevitable journey toward untold wealth.
“My fingers have definitely been crossed for a long time with this one,” Laurence Freedman, a long-standing investor who owns around 6 per cent of Audio Pixels, says.
He made his fortune from the sale of Equitilink, a fund management business, and is on the board of environmental technologies group Phoslock. “Sure, there are a lot of cheesed-off small investors selling small parcels, but I think very few people understood how difficult it would be to pull this off,” he says.
A decade of reasons given by Audio Pixels about why its high-tech audio technology was not ready has made the company the target of ridicule. Traders have taken to social media to suggest its latest statements have been generated by AI platform ChatGPT.
Investors have watched as the company soared to a market capitalisation as high as $900 million, then fell to $200 million, while delivering cumulative losses of about $50 million since 2011. Shares closed down 4.8 per cent on Tuesday at $7.51.
The technology might still be an ingenious idea – vibrating pixels on various frequencies could be able to produce a purely digital sound.
Bart stumbled upon the concept through Israeli engineers Daniel Lewin, Yuval Cohen and Eric Harber in 2006. The former rag trade entrepreneur, professional poker player, and space laser and weapons company chairman, took it upon himself to fund the development of what he would ultimately bill as “digitising the last analogue resource”.
Over the following 14 years, Bart tipped in millions of dollars of his own money, and raised more than $32 million from public investors.
When the stock hit the ASX boards – for the second time – in 2011, Audio Pixels told the market it had signed a manufacturing agreement with Sony. Investors were thrilled. Sony, they were told, was gearing up to mass-manufacture the digital chips.
“If all goes as planned ... the samples of playing chips will become available for market exposure in the last quarter [of 2012],” Bart wrote in a statement to the ASX, sending stock soaring to 37 per cent from $6.55 to $8.98.
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