Smyth Research Realiser A16
Oct 21, 2016 at 4:56 AM Post #361 of 15,877
My apologies , my fault for trying to compose when i cant find my specs 
 
I meant to second anothers request for A 16 to be sent to Ty from inner fidelity 
 
Cheers for your reply/informed answer 
 
Im near half way thru this thread and am excited by this new unit already
 
Only downer for me is as far as the personal presets go 
 
I live in a wee small Ontario farm town , hours from even a decent grocery store 
 
I dont drive atall either 
 
AFAIK or can imagine im likely a days drive from anywhere i could do those pre sets 
 
Im only imagining , when in fact i cant think of even one 
 
Online shopping has been a saviour for me :)- i can even buy groceries online now 
 
So it appears i ll be relying on others presets ,who knows what the future may hold as far as travelling goes 
 
In your opinion , is the possibility of never getting to a proper studio/location for presets , does it make this investment 
 
a wasted venture ?
 
Also , can i back these presets up somewhere ( it seems obvious  i should being its all digital information) in case something happens 
 
to the unit ?
 
Thanks for your time 
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 5:23 AM Post #362 of 15,877
No need to apologize, I just misunderstood what you were seconding! But I get it now :)

The A16 will in fact come with some generalized presets, which the A8's generic presets greatly impressed my friends that tried it out at CanJam: Southern California. Having the head tracking to keep the position of the virtual speakers stationary apparently goes a long way towards the realism and sense of directional imagery, and generic presets have been used by years in the gaming industry with great success (I'm looking to the Smyth as an endgame upgrade from my Astro Mixamp or my Creative X7). So out of the box, you should still have a great time.

However, personalized measurements should still produce the maximum benefit and realism, so any chance possible of getting measurements at a studio or after a vacation to an audio meet (last year I flew from the East Coast out to the Rockies mostly so I could attend the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in Colorado) would take the experience further. I couldn't make it to RMAF this year because of wedding plans, but there's another CanJam event in New York soon!

Lastly (or second to last?), Smyth Research has apparently designed a method for using even just one or two home speakers to make a measurement. The speakers sit stationary at a normal listening distance, and you would sit in a chair and spin so you present a different side of your head towards the speaker(s). The method is very clever and a great use of automation and the head-tracker, but it's also a great relief to me as I don't think most places would let me measure their speaker setups costing $$,$$$ and take the measurements home for free. Even if it only takes about 15 minutes of their time. All presets can be stored on your A16 or uploaded to Smyth's website for archiving or sharing.
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 6:24 AM Post #364 of 15,877
No need to apologize, I just misunderstood what you were seconding! But I get it now
smily_headphones1.gif


The A16 will in fact come with some generalized presets, which the A8's generic presets greatly impressed my friends that tried it out at CanJam: Southern California. Having the head tracking to keep the position of the virtual speakers stationary apparently goes a long way towards the realism and sense of directional imagery, and generic presets have been used by years in the gaming industry with great success (I'm looking to the Smyth as an endgame upgrade from my Astro Mixamp or my Creative X7). So out of the box, you should still have a great time.

However, personalized measurements should still produce the maximum benefit and realism, so any chance possible of getting measurements at a studio or after a vacation to an audio meet (last year I flew from the East Coast out to the Rockies mostly so I could attend the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in Colorado) would take the experience further. I couldn't make it to RMAF this year because of wedding plans, but there's another CanJam event in New York soon!

Lastly (or second to last?), Smyth Research has apparently designed a method for using even just one or two home speakers to make a measurement. The speakers sit stationary at a normal listening distance, and you would sit in a chair and spin so you present a different side of your head towards the speaker(s). The method is very clever and a great use of automation and the head-tracker, but it's also a great relief to me as I don't think most places would let me measure their speaker setups costing $$,$$$ and take the measurements home for free. Even if it only takes about 15 minutes of their time. All presets can be stored on your A16 or uploaded to Smyth's website for archiving or sharing.

Again thank you for informed replies here .
 
You ve made my decision easier , but now i have to Jones .
 
I ve finally got to the threads end , and need to hit the bed which was where i was headed hours ago when i seen this thread 
 
I seen no trace of infos as to when us non kickstarters can purchase one  Any ideas there?
 
Im hoping after my new amp , this will be available 
 
I also see concerns over HDR . My tv has HDR .ill likely watch movies , but not mainly tho 
 
For audio am i correct that this HDR/hdmi 2.0aA/2.1 ? is of no concern ? And if A 16 isnt hdmi capable of HDR , will it not just downsample ? 
 
Admittedly im confused as to how a video concept affects an audio device .
 
Thanks mate 
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 10:22 AM Post #365 of 15,877
...I seen no trace of infos as to when us non kickstarters can purchase one  Any ideas there?


From an earlier post I made in this thread:
Smyth research have launched a preorder opportunity and price for up to 100 more Realisers. I would expect that the estimated delivery will be after the Kickstarter backers but also in July 2017, as very few people backed that batch. The preorder offer states:

Pre-sale Offer: US$1450 + shipping + taxes

This represents a 25% discount on the estimated online retail price of US$1950 + taxes + shipping. A maximum of 100 Realiser A16s are available under this special time-limited offer. This offer will close when either 100 deposits have been submitted or on the 31 December 2016, whichever is soonest. Please read our Terms and Conditions before you apply to our pre-sales deposit scheme.

The offer can be found at http://smyth-research.com/index.html


I pulled together Smyth Research's responses from the Kickstarter comments that provided additional insight on the operation of the A16 or extra features they will be adding in post #303. The details are behind a spoiler alert.

Hopefully you will have already found links for the Realiser A16 – Additional Technical Information and the Realiser Exchange – a new Virtual Audio Exchange website.

(Please note that I am not a representative of Smyth Research and have no connection with them, other than having backed them for a Realiser A16 on Kickstarter and being really impressed during their demonstration at CanJam London 2016.)
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 1:52 PM Post #366 of 15,877
From an earlier post I made in this thread:
I pulled together Smyth Research's responses from the Kickstarter comments that provided additional insight on the operation of the A16 or extra features they will be adding in post #303. The details are behind a spoiler alert.

Hopefully you will have already found links for the Realiser A16 – Additional Technical Information and the Realiser Exchange – a new Virtual Audio Exchange website.

(Please note that I am not a representative of Smyth Research and have no connection with them, other than having backed them for a Realiser A16 on Kickstarter and being really impressed during their demonstration at CanJam London 2016.)

Thank you
 
I will check those now 
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 2:42 PM Post #367 of 15,877
You know, it would be interesting to see what the market price on an A8 will be next year.  Entirely possible to perhaps score an A8 at under $1k, I think.  And, while it would not have all the bells and whistles of the A16, it would still do ultimately convincing stereo and 5 and 7 chasnnel surround,  which is probably what 99 percent of everything will continue to be for at least the next five years.
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 4:29 PM Post #368 of 15,877
Thanks for a great report! 
 
Quote:
But while the accuracy of replicating the loudspeaker was 100%, the loudspeakers did something the Realizer did not in the same way. As every good loudspeaker setup does, it creates a certain stage behind the loudspeakers. It is almost like a fake room they create. I am not sure why they do this but it seems almost independent of the audio input. Now the Realizer A16 also puts the audio events somewhere behind the virtual loudspeakers, but no room is created. This is something I have to investigate further when I will finally get my A16.

This gets to something that has bothered me about the Realizer system for a long time. To get the most accurate representation of what the eardrum hears, the microphone for HRTF measurements presumably should be located as deeply in the ear canal as possible, i.e. close to the eardrum. This way, the entire influence of the head and ear's shape can be captured fully.
 
To make use of such a HRTF measurement, the only reasonable headphone would actually be in-ear monitors since they put the transducer really close to the eardrum.
 
Yet the Realizer system uses traditional over- or on-the-ear headphones. You potentially lose the subtle contributions of the parts of the ear that presumably contribute a lot to our sense of soundstaging and imaging, such as the curvature and shape of the edges of our ears. Maybe even the flesh of the ear itself makes a difference, say to sounds coming around our head but that pass through the back of the ear towards the ear canal.
 
This is made even more confusing when you look at demos where Stax phones are used (solid leather earpads) together with HD800 (much more open area around the ears). It seems difficult to compensate for the approach of the sound waves around the border of the ear by mere frequency response matching.
 
So my conclusion is that the Realizer only attempts to reproduce the gross influence of the head itself, rather than the finer aspects of ear shape and composition.
 
Perhaps that is why you don't get the full soundstaging effect that you hear with loudspeakers?
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 4:40 PM Post #369 of 15,877
Perhaps that is why you don't get the full soundstaging effect that you hear with loudspeakers?

Interesting idea. I would have guessed some one has done some research about this?

There was a German company called Klassik Headphone Optimizer at the Can Jam in Essen 2015 who actualy did the equalizing for each headphone by measurement and some hand tweaking.
http://www.hifi-forum.de/bild/personalisiert_603092.html
Actualy the headphones sounded way better when you allowed his equalizing. So I guess measuring the headphones with the microphones which Smyth does is more about bettering the sound quality and not so much about the 3D.
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 6:18 PM Post #370 of 15,877
...It seems difficult to compensate for the approach of the sound waves around the border of the ear by mere frequency response matching...[/B]


The Realiser is not just doing frequency response matching. It is measuring and using the impulse response which will address both amplitude and timing for both initial sound and reverberations across the frequency range.

Whilst a deeply inserted microphone might be ideal it would require an experienced audiologist to insert the microphones without risking damage to the eardrum and thus it would not be an appropriate facility to offer to individual users of the Realiser.
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 7:53 PM Post #371 of 15,877
Interesting idea. I would have guessed some one has done some research about this?

There was a German company called Klassik Headphone Optimizer at the Can Jam in Essen 2015 who actualy did the equalizing for each headphone by measurement and some hand tweaking.
http://www.hifi-forum.de/bild/personalisiert_603092.html
Actualy the headphones sounded way better when you allowed his equalizing. So I guess measuring the headphones with the microphones which Smyth does is more about bettering the sound quality and not so much about the 3D.

 
Cool, although that seems to be matching frequency response to a theoretical neutral response rather than the full freq/phase matrix compensation of HRTF? Sorry, my Google German ain't too hot.
 
 
The Realiser is not just doing frequency response matching. It is measuring and using the impulse response which will address both amplitude and timing for both initial sound and reverberations across the frequency range.

Whilst a deeply inserted microphone might be ideal it would require an experienced audiologist to insert the microphones without risking damage to the eardrum and thus it would not be an appropriate facility to offer to individual users of the Realiser.

 
Sorry I wasn't conveying myself clearly. By "frequency response matching" I was speaking only about neutralizing the frequency response of the headphone used with the Realizer, not the HRTF measurements which clearly have to take frequency and phase into account.
 
I agree a deeply-inserted HRTF measurement -- not to mention a customized in-ear monitor solution -- would require a level of customer involvement that probably wouldn't work on the commercial scale Smyth is probably going for. I was just brainstorming why Richter Di might not have been able to hear the full soundstage of the loudspeaker setup in the Realizer demo.
 
Oct 21, 2016 at 8:04 PM Post #372 of 15,877
  This gets to something that has bothered me about the Realizer system for a long time. To get the most accurate representation of what the eardrum hears, the microphone for HRTF measurements presumably should be located as deeply in the ear canal as possible, i.e. close to the eardrum. This way, the entire influence of the head and ear's shape can be captured fully.
 
To make use of such a HRTF measurement, the only reasonable headphone would actually be in-ear monitors since they put the transducer really close to the eardrum.
 
Yet the Realizer system uses traditional over- or on-the-ear headphones. You potentially lose the subtle contributions of the parts of the ear that presumably contribute a lot to our sense of soundstaging and imaging, such as the curvature and shape of the edges of our ears. Maybe even the flesh of the ear itself makes a difference, say to sounds coming around our head but that pass through the back of the ear towards the ear canal.

 
 Although there's little you can do to refine the HPEQ measurement itself, you can control how you use its raw data. What the Realiser does is take the measured headphone frequency response and inverts it into a compensatory 32-band graphic EQ curve. However, this process involves some technical compromises (such as the fact that your ear canal's resonance isn't captured by the foam-clad mini-mics), so the Realiser lets you finesse the HPEQ setting by ear, either in a broad-brush manner by adjusting the potency of the EQ across three frequency zones, or by tweaking each of the 32 HPEQ bands individually, in 0.5dB increments over a ±9.5dB range. In the latter scenario, the Realiser feeds a noise test signal through each of the EQ bands in turn so you can directly compare real and virtualised sounds via a special head-tracking mode (see 'Off The Beaten Tracking' box for details).
 
(...)
 
Better Than The Real Thing?
 
Although the Realiser never sounds exactly the same as the specific speaker system it samples, that certainly doesn't mean that it sounds worse. In fact, one of the most intriguing things about this system for users of small studios is that the Realiser actually has the potential to be better, for mixing purposes, than the speakers it's modelling! For example, because standard convolution is incapable of capturing dynamic effects such as compression and distortion, the SVS emulation will usually exhibit less power compression than real speakers, meaning that as long as you have an excellent set of headphones, the frequency-response characteristics of the virtual speakers change less than those of real ones as you adjust the monitoring volume. You'll also hear less distortion, which means that the Realiser tends to present instrument timbres more cleanly and reveal a greater degree of low-level mix detail — the latter further enhanced by any reduction in background noise your headphone earcups provide.
 
But that's not all. The maximum duration of the impulse response data in a PRIR file is around 800ms, but the Realiser lets you choose, post-sampling, how much of it you actually want to use. This means that you can reduce any undesirable reverb tail in your monitoring room by truncating the PRIR data, much as you can with an impulse response running in a convolution reverb plug-in. (Even if you're sampling a bone-dry monitoring environment, you might also wish to use this to eliminate any vestige of the convolution engine's artificial 'ghost' reverb overhang, as mentioned in the main article.) For more detailed control, you can also apply a handful of preset volume envelopes to the PRIR data to adjust the balance between the beginning and end of the file, thereby suggesting a change in the distance between the speaker and the listener as the ratio of direct/reflected sound changes. And these PRIR tweaks aren't just available on a global level — you can also apply them speaker by speaker. It's pretty freaky stuff.
 
But easily the coolest weapon in the Realiser's arsenal is the Direct Bass feature. This allows you to reroute the low-frequency information that normally feeds the Tactile output, mixing it into the headphone signal instead, but bypassing the SVS processing. What this means is that if your speaker system's low end is compromised by low-frequency room modes (in other words, if you've spent less than five figures on acoustic design), you can filter the lumpy low end out of the SVS emulation and replace it with unsullied direct signal (low-pass-filtered and delayed as appropriate), in effect giving you ruler-flat low end. Indeed, despite having spent at least £1500 acoustically treating the low-frequency resonances in my own mix room, I still ended up preferring the unnatural neutrality of Direct Bass when emulating my monitors on the Realiser. Yes, you read that right: the Direct Bass function delivered a clearer and more usable low-end balance than my full-range nearfield monitoring system!
 
Now you might expect the Direct Bass to sound odd, because it's completely free of the sampled room reflections that affect the virtual speaker signals. However, as long as you take your time setting up the appropriate crossover, level and delay parameters, you'll find that it does little to undermine the realism of the SVS illusion, because low-frequency spatial cues are naturally so weak, even in real rooms. Those people with large 2.0 stereo setups may notice some reduction in the subjective width of low-frequency sources, but if your speakers are smaller two-way designs or a 2.1 system with a shared subwoofer, this difference will be pretty minimal. And besides, it's a negligible price to pay for a speaker listening experience with the smoothest bass response you're ever likely to hear.
 

http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/smyth-research-realiser-a8#top

 
Quote:
IN EAR HEADPHONES
 
  1. Q. Any suggestions on how to use in-ear-headphones (how to measure HPEQ with them, e.g. using a small tube where I put the mic in one end and the headphone in the other end.)?

    A. Your ‘ear canal’ tube idea is probably a good one. My only concern is that IEM EQ is all about attenuating the closed ear canal resonance which depends very much on the individual’s ear canal dimensions. Perhaps such an arrangement could be used as an initial measurement which could then be fine tuned using some other manual method. I would need to do some experiments. In previous comments I have come round to the idea of providing a minimum threshold measurement, or subjective EQ as I call it. I suspect this technique will also work for in-ear EQ. Imagine you are using the manual EQ method of the A8, but instead of comparing the headphone to the loudspeaker, you are adjusting the subband gain until you can just hear the subband signal. Normalising these subband gains with the standardised sensitivity curve will result in a flat in-ear response. Another method, which I have used in the lab, is to compare subband signal levels between an IEM and an already equalised over-ear headphone. For example, you put the IEM in the left ear only and then place the headphones over both ears. The listener switches between playing the subband signal to only the headphone right ear or only the IEM left ear, and adjusts the left ear subband gain until the volume appear similar in both ears. This is repeated for each frequency subband. Then the IEM is placed in the right ear and the whole process repeated again. It’s tedious but it does work.
    So the possible methods are, increase the frequency resolution of the new subjective EQ measurement and/or implement this IEM-Headphone comparison method. There are pros and cons with both.

 
Oct 22, 2016 at 6:45 AM Post #373 of 15,877
 (...) For example, because standard convolution is incapable of capturing dynamic effects such as compression and distortion, (...) You'll also hear less distortion, which means that the Realiser tends to present instrument timbres more cleanly and reveal a greater degree of low-level mix detail — the latter further enhanced by any reduction in background noise your headphone earcups provide.  

http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/smyth-research-realiser-a8#top

 
On the other hand:
 
 The A16 expands on the HPEQ procedures that were available on the A8. We have introduced a low latency procedure to be used for the low latency gaming and live applications. We have added a second HPEQ filter option that uses a causal filter structure that has the potential to generate a cleaner headphone impulse response than our traditional symmetrical FIR approach. Finally we have increased the sub‐band resolution of the manual HPEQ method and made the procedure less clunky. We also have a third parametric HPEQ option in development to be released in firmware updates following the initial launch of the product.
 
http://smyth-research.com/downloads/additional_KS_info.pdf

 
Therefore, some digital filter algorithms are said to be cleaner than others.
 
Does anyone know what filter is set in the demonstrations? Did anyone hear the new causal filter yet?
 
I have tried to grasp the different methods for filtering, but the mathematics is beyond my understanding.
 
Oct 23, 2016 at 4:46 AM Post #374 of 15,877
Thank you jgazal! I did not know this soundonsound article. It was really interesting to read that this professional reviewer did also hear the differences between the speaker setup and the headphones, but at the same time not describing the headphones as inferior. As I wrote from my 20 minutes in the hot seat in Paris, I prefered the headphones over the speakers.
 
Oct 25, 2016 at 1:49 PM Post #375 of 15,877

Was it because the headphone set up let you hear more of the speakers and less of the room?
 

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