Pro Audio’s Millennia Applies to Trademark HDR-A; Owner Calls It 'Stealth Technology'

Professional audio supplier Millennia Music & Media Systems applied to register the trademark HDR-A for use on equipment for the “recording, transmission, processing and reproduction of sound,” said Patent and Trademark Office records. HDR-A’s first use in commerce was “at least as early as” Sept. 3, the date of the application, said the records. “The mark consists of standard characters, without claim to any particular font style, size, or color,” said the application. It appears on the front panel of Millennia's HV-3C two-channel mic preamplifier to highlight the product’s high dynamic range audio functionality. Millennia founder John La Grou owns the HDR-A mark and filed the application without an attorney, said the PTO records Though most of the industry’s recent attention has turned to HDR video, HDR audio, the ratio between the loudest and the softest audible sounds on a recording, has been around for decades and reached mainstream popularity with the advent of the CD. La Grou won’t comment on HDR-A because it’s “a stealth technology” that Millennia hasn’t announced, he emailed us Saturday. “Probably 2Q20.” The HV-3C is a new “iteration of our famous HV-3 micamp, used to record more feature film scores and classical music recordings than any other microphone preamplifier over the last 25 years,” said La Grou. The HV-3, introduced in the early 1990s, was inducted this year into the National Association of Music Merchants Technical Hall of Fame, he said. Recent history shows PTO giving HDR trademark applicants a rough go even if they got agency approval. PTO killed Sony’s application to trademark an 8K HDR logo earlier this year after examiners twice refused it for being “merely descriptive” of Sony’s goods (see 1902040020). Dolby Labs twice failed to pass PTO examiners’ merely-descriptive tests on its JPEG-HDR trademark application. Dolby ultimately landed registration of the trademark after nearly two years of trying, and succeeded only after amending the application to suit PTO's objections.