Just in passing, if there's any one thing which is MOST significant in how thing's "sound" played back through the Realiser, my own feeling is that it is the PRIR measurement itself. This is the "sonic photograph" of the captured room's listening environment, and it will be far and away what you will really hear through your heaphones/amp.
Sure, the quality of the headphones/amp clearly make a big difference too. But my own feeling is that the A/D/A conversions in the Realiser vs. using digital input and digital output-to-DAC is not really going to make as much of a difference as you might "fear". Now to be honest, I've not heard my familiar AIX PRIR utilized with digital input/output, as I'm using analog input/output... so maybe I'm not really justified in expressing this opinion.
But what I CAN say for absolute sure is that of all the various PRIR's I've collected so far, NONE sounds as good as the AIX 5.1 and 7.1 PRIR. Period. They're all different, but all except the AIX PRIR produces an "echo", as if I'm sitting in a "listening cavity". I'm probably hearing some delay between front and rear speakers in all of those other "rooms" that got picked up and measured by the microphones, which for some reason did NOT occur in the AIX room. I suspect it might be that the AIX room is absolutely superb in its baffling, and that this room is truly "dead".
But as a result, the AIX PRIR for me is ABSOLUTE PERFECTION of listening. There is zero echo. The sound is intimate and close-up and the B&W speakers are "pure" and clean, with the front speakers clearly in front of me and all the other speakers clearly arrayed around me. I don't know if there was something truly unusual that occurred during my AIX measurement (which, ironically, was also my very first ever PRIR measurement and the first one "administered by Lorr" and offered by AIX...and it turns out is actually the ONLY PRIR I EVER LISTEN THROUGH, for everything!) that makes it so unique for me, but I don't really enjoy listening to any other "room". I'm completely spoiled by the AIX experience, which actually for me is my total Realiser experience.
So... I come back again to what I feel would probably be a relatively minor and subtle (but probably noticeable) difference when using digital input/output instead of analog input/output, and whether or not one amp or another is used.
But based on my own experience I would assert that FAR MORE SIGNIFICANT to what a Realiser experience sounds like is the listening room captured by the PRIR you listen through, which will determine whether or not you actually ever listen to any of your collected PRIR's or just settle in on one for pretty much everything... because you really really enjoy it. That's how I feel about my AIX PRIR.
Now, I'm hoping to acquire a new Stax SRM-007tII headphone amp shortly, as an addition (or replacement) to my 1993-vintage SRM-T1S. I will be very interested to see if there is any noticeable difference in Realiser-produced sound (after creating a new HPEQ) using the new driver, or whether it will still sound like the same AIX "room". I fully expect the new amp to "sound better" in a non-Realiser mode (e.g. listening to audio CDs), but I'm very curious to to see how the AIX "room" sounds when the Realiser PRIR+HPEQ is involved.:
