The Stax thread (New) - Page 1157

As far as I understand, the profile you obtain at their place is a calibration for the speaker 'sound sig'. It is independent of your choice of headphone. You could plug a set of M50s in and the Realizer would still try to make it sound like the speakers the system were calibrated to. So you don't need a profile for each headphone, you need a different profile for each speaker system you measure.

Very cool. I might have to consider one down the road. Thanks for the info and sorry about the off topic.

Yes you do the profile (HPEQ) at your home for any thing that is downstream from the Realiser, that includes headphones, has nothing to do with were you did your PRIR's.

 

Yes when I got my Realiser they showed just the package deal, but because I already had the HD-800's they reduced the price by just getting the Realiser. I think I was about $850 less. I was lucky that when I got my Realiser the second edition Realiser that could be up-graded to the HDMI ports had just been re-least, HDMI compatibility is now in the latest Realiser. By using the HDMI in port of the Realiser I can bypass the Realisers DAC, there by keeping the signal digital. The audio signal must be in the LPCM digital form for the Realiser to do It's magic.

 

Yes you should do a new profile (HPEQ) for anything you change down stream of the Realiser including headphones, this is very important.

Matter if fact, I have had to do about 9 or 10 HPEQ's with my Stax combo to get it right, that's how important the HPEQ really is.

Edited by sillysally - 2/14/12 at 10:45pm

I agree with milosz in that I don't care very much about soundstage in headphones. I know speakers will always do a much better job imaging, and recordings are made for 2-channel speaker systems. While good soundstage is a nice bonus in a headphone, it's not something I think about when purchasing, as I realize it will never be as good as even a cheap speaker system. As long as the imaging is not totally flat (think of a SR-225i) I'm pretty happy. Anyway, headphones are my hobby and speakers aren't. I know I could get a great speaker setup, but I'm just not interested. It's never "headphones vs. speakers" in my head. For the true zealot, there can be only one focus in life!

Well with the O2 i think the stereo reproduction is very comparable to at least a nice near-field speaker setup, The imaging and depth layering are rendered at an extremley satisfying level to me, just scaled to a smaller sound field.

 

The SR-202, the only other stat that i've heard, was much flatter in depth but retained the level if imaging accuracy iirc. I wonder what part the O2's angular pads design have in this improvement relative to the increased diaphram surface and it's better resolution. Does the SR-507, the pinnacle of lambda design today, display noticeably better stage depth than lower/older lambdas?

To each there own.

 

 

Edited by sillysally - 2/15/12 at 5:06am

does anyone know if the realizer introduces cross coupling between channels, or if it is a linear filter for each channel?

i never heard of this before and will have to do some research 

Probably time to brush on this great article on headwize about head stage vs. sounstage with the O2 ;). Indeed, the high end stax gear conveys imo a realistic headstage with precise width/depth and layering (the SR009 takes this 3 notches above the O2mkII in my system). A speaker presentation, no. A satisfying rendering, to my ears, yes very much if there's adequate source material to start with (not necessarily binaural).

 

You need to read about HRTFs, there's probably some easy to grasp material on the Smyth website. The short answer is that the PRIR is an HRTF for the headings of a typical 5.1 or  7.1 A/V system and includes room response (as any multi-channel mix isn't supposed to be played back in a totally dry sounding environment). HRTFs means that, each speaker output is mapped into a binaural signal with effectively a cross-feed between the ears. The beauty of it is that it's not one of those approximate filters with some delay / tonal correction, neither is it based on some random dummy head HRTF: it's using your actual head to generate the HRTF with as much precision as can be practically achieved through tiny in-ear mics.

 

As mentioned above, there needs to be some correction to play that back through headphones as you don't want to have the pinna interacting twice with the signal. That's were the HPEQ comes into the pictures: it's simply trying to equalize out the headphone response and it's interaction with the outer ear (e.g. trying to make the headphone measure flat at the same tiny mics location that are placed at the entrance of the ear canal). The HPEQ can thus occur anywhere, provided it's not too noisy environment (you just insert the mics like you did in the PRIR recording, but this time instead of playing a signal through the speakers to your bare head, the realizer is playing a signal through the headphones you're wearing). I suppose you can have multiple HPEQs just like I believe it accommodates multiple users with different PRIRs...

Edited by arnaud - 2/15/12 at 6:21am

Thanks Arnaud!

I'm familiar with the technical methodology you describe. To a techie geek like myself, this is a very clever scheme in my opinion.
(I went to their website)

I used to have Carver's speaker version for 2 speakers (can't remember what he called it) and my old
headroom portable amp has a switch for turning on a 'spatializer-y' thing that i've never particularly liked.

Cheers

p.s. Too bad this isn't the type of thing you can bring to a canjam since the response is tailored to a single individual.............

You can store up to 64 PRIR's and 64 HPEQ's in the Realiser, plus as many as you can fit on SD cards for use in the Realiser.

Yes, but if I show up at my local canjam, none of those will be a match for me.
What if we all got ourselves measured and carried our personal hearing profiles, per realizer spec,
on SD cards in our pockets? Then it would work.

But that would defeat the point of 'trying it' at a meet

I agree. If you are walking around with a HPEQ/PRIR in your pocket, then you already have it set up. If you use that at a meet you will simply be listening to a system you already own. 
 

 

so there is no way to deconvolve this into a part that is only a function of your ears (vs. someone else ears)?

if the resultant can be factored into a 'system' part and a 'person' part, which together give the correct result, this would be possible.
without looking at the mathematics, i really can't tell.

interesting stuff though