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).
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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