Immersion Networks' mission seems basic and desirable—and very ambitious: "to reframe the human listening experience." Yet, despite being led by some of the most brilliant minds in audio technology, the Redmond-based company has gone into receivership and it had to vacate its spacious offices in April, because its more than $20,000/month rent became untenable. Immersion Networks' existence now hangs in the balance, with an auction of its hardware and software being held June 10-17. 

For people who value high-quality listening experiences, this is a potential tragedy.

Immersion Networks was founded in 2014 by world-class audio experts and engineers, including chief scientist James D. "JJ" Johnston, CEO Paul Hubert, and COO Jim Rondinelli. IN's founders have created hundreds of patents that have advanced audio technology, including Johnston's vaunted AAC codec. If you've consumed music on a 21st-century device, you've benefited from their handiwork. One of IN's most important products is mix³ (aka mixcubed), the first 3D audio mixing platform that enables musicians, producers, engineers, podcasters, and content creators to transform sound files into deeply layered, headphone-ready mixes. 

Hubert's history is fascinating. He hacked a video game at age 10 and was hired by Apple at age 11. Prince tapped the 20-year-old Hubert to help him integrate computers, drum machines, and synths in the legendary musician's Paisley Park studio. To this day, Hubert staunchly believes that IN's technology "is how people will be listening to music" in the future.

Rondinelli's background in marketing and business with mp3.com, Rdio, and Warner/Chappell and as an audio engineer who's worked with Big Star, Wilco, Weezer, and many others made him the ideal candidate as IN's chief operating officer. Now, unfortunately, he's tasked with handling IN's precarious affairs. 

"Immersion was really an untethered audio research lab with a tragic lack of product strategy," Rondinelli explained in a phone interview with The Stranger. "It also had an almost destructive desire to keep everything developed inside the lab a secret. They're incredibly reclusive, secretive people, particularly Paul Hubert. He created all these brilliant things, but you have to sell people on a vision."

Essentially, Rondinelli said, IN "has collapsed under the weight of its own lack of clarity. In April 2024, I finally got the runway to bring in some product-management consultants to help us try to create products out of this incredible and transformative portfolio of patents and technologies. We divided the company's inventions into several lanes and put the company up for sale. But in November, when the company was running out of money and with a massive debt payment coming due, I reported back to the board of directors that we were having trouble getting the company sold and that we were running out of cash." Therefore, the board of directors unanimously decided to put the company into receivership.

In addition to the auction for the hardware from IN's Redmond facility—organized by Turning Point Advisors and receiver Eric Camm via Murphy Auction—there is an opportunity to purchase all of IN's patents. "There's still a possibility that somebody could come in and swoop it all up in one purchase," Rondinelli said. "But every day that gets closer to the middle of June, we get closer to this thing being auctioned off, people gnawing the meat off of the skeleton."

When asked what would be the ideal scenario for IN, Rondinelli replied, "A deep-pocketed technology company with an interest in cross media and entertainment purchases [IN] and allows us to finish the job of getting these technologies into the hands—and ears—of people. Because whether it has been technically inclined people, industry peers, highly esteemed, golden-ears people like George Massenburg or Sebastian Krys, both of whom are multi-winning Grammy producers and engineers, everybody has been impressed by how we can make things sound and feel and how we can depict space. Meaning, how we can portray the sense of three-dimensional space, even through standard headphones and the hardware you have? "We'd all love to see it go to somebody who would allow us to finish the last step: taking it from research into product applications and getting it released."

Rondinelli is not optimistic about realizing this scenario. "I haven't given up, but to use a football metaphor, we're down by 6, we're playing one of the best defenses in the league, our team is solid and committed, but we are on our own 3 yard line."

So, despite creating amazing technologies, IN has had difficulty persuading large tech companies to adopt them. "One of the challenges with the technology that Immersion developed is that it's very technical and arcane," Rondinelli said. "Unless you run large pools of music groups, it's difficult to get meaningful data. Everybody can show you a frequency, but it doesn't make a difference. What really makes a difference is how you perceive it when you hear it." IN introduced its products to one of the world's biggest music-streaming services, and its audio people loved it, but ultimately, Rondinelli noted, they passed, because they had "a vested interest in keeping their own jobs" and thought it would "be a pain in the ass for them to integrate it."

What factors make IN technology superior to others'? "All of the other technologies out there are either a rehash of what was done in the '70s or leveraged codecs that we developed, which JJ invented and published in the early '90s. My iPhone has more power than a room of Cray supercomputers from the time they were developing AAC [Advanced Audio Coding]. There's so much more that we can do just with the processing. Second is, knowing we were designing this stuff for Immersive, there are elements of audio that are thrown out—not only in the AAC codec, but in Dolby Atmos and Eclipsa Audio [a Google/Samsung product], and all the other competing technologies—which we know are critical for people to have an understanding of where they believe they're sitting in space. And those codecs are intentionally throwing those data out. By starting with a clean sheet of paper, knowing that we were making an immersive codec, we knew not to throw that stuff out when we needed to save bits. Finally, our researchers had 50 years of experience working on these kinds of technologies. Everybody who worked at our shop knew enough about stuff that it fundamentally made for a different approach to product development. We could eliminate and avoid mistakes we know everybody else is putting into their [products]. That's the tech answer. From a subjective point, you can do interesting things with other platforms. But you can't create the feeling that somebody walked into a different space. That's something we've done with people time and time again."

Tacoma-based Stranger Music Genius Steve Fisk has used IN to remix the 1992 cult classic album by the late poet Steven Jesse Bernstein, Prison, and Pigeonhed's 1997 LP, The Full Sentence. Other musicians and producers who've been impressed by IN include Krist Novoselic, Kim Thayil, Ben Gibbard, Tucker Martine, Patoranking, and Joe Cruz, music director for David Byrne's Here Lies Love Broadway musical.

I had the privilege to visit IN the day before the company departed its Redmond space. I took in the stunning, state-of-the-art equipment and listened to Fisk's remixes mentioned above. On headphones, Fisk's music felt, yes, immersive, rich, and expertly feng shui'd.

"This room had a six-second reverb when they built it," Fisk observed that day in Immersion's audio lab. IN designed the room "so when you close the door, you can hear all the little noises in your head. The speakers are made of kevlar. And there are no subs in here, because all the speakers go down to 11 cycles. Everything in here is homemade.You heard a little bit of the future... if there's even going to be a future. Will people even listen to music in the future?"

What sets IN apart from other technology that Fisk has used in his decades-long career? "I live or die by the limitations of conventional stereo: only so much room in the low end, bass guitars fights with kick drums, cymbals mask lyric intelligibility, guitars fight with cymbals. Not a bad scene, but a pretty arcane aesthetic based on human hearing, evolving audio tech and the now-defunct music biz. This is not a problem. It is the world as it is. "Immersion is a complete rethink by scientists with a profound love of music and sound. It transports the listener to a place where singers and instruments manifest in a very real audio space, in front, to the sides, in back, above. For those of us that still sit and listen, the IN platform is/was a little glimpse of the future. [Dolby Atmos] is an old fried egg. Immersion is a gourmet frittata."

"I always say, if you want somebody to support this thing, you have to get them into the room," Rondinelli said. "Because it's a really hard thing to describe, but once you hear it, you say, 'Oh my god, this changes everything!'" Currently, IN's technology is sitting on servers, in limbo. Rondinelli said, "The worst-case scenario is that somebody will get it for cheap at the auction and not know what to do with the code. Then it'll sit there. Or it will go to some patent troll. 

"Immersion is the most intrinsically satisfying thing I've ever worked on. But because it doesn't have the letters 'AI' in the description... We can bullshit people that it's an AI, but none of us are going to do that.  

"I hope people get to experience this stuff, one way or another. Somebody's going to get the deal of the century, I'll tell you that. Tens of millions of dollars were invested in developing this. Now that it's in auction, somebody's going to get it for a fraction of that. I just hope it gets to the light of day."