[sander99]

I'd like to know where everyone is getting this "analog only" measurement sweep information from. It looks to me like it came from a post on Aug 15 from Sander 99 where he listed a number of other limitations such as no vertical headtracking. My question is where is he getting this information from because unless it's coming from a reliable source, it sounds like purely rampant speculation.

All from the last update:

The A16 is being shipped with only a single operating mode and with a slightly reduced set of features, outlined below.

Just look at that list of features in the update.

 

[sander99]

If that list turns out to be simply incomplete and the A16 can do much more than what's in that list I'd be the happiest person!

Anyway, in a few days we will hopefully know a lot more.

 

[sander99]

When I was chatting with James I asked if the A16 came with a preloaded room. He said it did and that it was an Atmos room and that I could "have lots of fun right away". Do we have any idea how this room works? Does it just apply a generic HRTF to it, or do you need to be able to have access to being able to sweeps? I guess what I'm asking is if we've ever figured out if we ca customize this room and how? If I can get something realistic sounding out of that room without access to a receiver for a bit I'd be fine with that until I track down an analog one to capture the room I want to.

The preloaded room will be a generic, or rather just someone else's or a dummy head PRIR (that would be a BRIR for everyone else). It depends on pure chance how well it works for you.
(The Smyth plan is that you can personalise a high quality BRIR using your own low quality PRIR on the exchange website. So for that you would still have to make a PRIR yourself, with speakers in the same locations as they are in the BRIR, and for this purpose a PRIR made with only a tweeter can be sufficient. But when will that service be available? We don't know.)

 

[phoenixdogfan]

All from the last update:

Just look at that list of features in the update.

Thank you, Sander. For me, this is just too far from what was initially promised for me to be interested. I'll continue to monitor to see if they improve this thing. But for $4k, which is what I would have to pay at this point, this thing looks virtually useless.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

It was my understanding thaat it would be possible to make a high quality Multi channel PRIR by using one speaker and rotating your head and body to different positions to capture the angle of each of the 16 surround channels, and using the headtracker to signal when the proper head angle had been achieved before activating the measurement channel for that particular surrounding speaker, and do that sequentially. Is that feature going to be active with the initially shipped units?

 

[Got the Shakes]

The preloaded room will be a gOnce my unit arrives aeneric, or rather just someone else's or a dummy head PRIR (that would be a BRIR for everyone else). It depends on pure chance how well it works for you.
(The Smyth plan is that you can personalise a high quality BRIR using your own low quality PRIR on the exchange website. So for that you would still have to make a PRIR yourself, with speakers in the same locations as they are in the BRIR, and for this purpose a PRIR made with only a tweeter can be sufficient. But when will that service be available? We don't know.)

That's what I figured. Thanks.

Well at least I have a plan, once my unit arrives on Monday and I confirm that you can't do the sweeps via HDMI or disk, I'll just have to buy a receiver that has 6 channel analog input. Good thing is they're cheap on eBay. Could probably have one here shipped for like $60. I could use that just for measurements and then disconnect it and put the existing setup back together. That would at least give me one room customized to me for the time being. Not ideal, and I won't be thrilled about the process of making it all happen, but it would be a pretty cheap route for me to go to at least get something that sounds good.

 

[sander99]

Well at least I have a plan, once my unit arrives on Monday and I confirm that you can't do the sweeps via HDMI or disk, I'll just have to buy a receiver that has 6 channel analog input. Good thing is they're cheap on eBay. Could probably have one here shipped for like $60.

Did you think about EQ/room correction? If you want to use that the receiver you buy should be able to apply EQ and whatever to the multi channel analog inputs and many/most receivers can't!
(And it is very hard to figure out which receivers can and which can't without simply trying, I know because I have been at it already, downloading and reading manuals and such and I haven't found one manual yet that clearly states the device can do it!)

On the other hand, maybe an uncorrected system doesn't need to sound bad.

And something else: if the receiver you buy can do room correction/EQ but not with the multi channel analog inputs:
You could do the PRIR measurement of the uncorrected/non-EQd system.
But do calibrate that receiver's room correction/EQ to the speakers in the room.
And later at home connect the pre-outs of that same receiver - still calibrated to the speakers and room that you measured - to the analog inputs of your A16. The A16 simulates the uncorrected/non-EQd system over headphones so if you feed the realiser with the corrected/EQd signal from your receiver the result should be good! But of course this is only possible for the number of channels and the sound formats that the receiver supports. For clarity: in this case you use the receiver as decoder.

The system you want to measure is 5.1?

 

[Got the Shakes]

Did you think about EQ/room correction? If you want to use that the receiver you buy should be able to apply EQ and whatever to the multi channel analog inputs and many/most receivers can't!
(And it is very hard to figure out which receivers can and which can't without simply trying, I know because I have been at it already, downloading and reading manuals and such and I haven't found one manual yet that clearly states the device can do it!)

On the other hand, maybe an uncorrected system doesn't need to sound bad.

And something else: if the receiver you buy can do room correction/EQ but not with the multi channel analog inputs:
You could do the PRIR measurement of the uncorrected/non-EQd system.
But do calibrate that receiver's room correction/EQ to the speakers in the room.
And later at home connect the pre-outs of that same receiver - still calibrated to the speakers and room that you measured - to the analog inputs of your A16. The A16 simulates the uncorrected/non-EQd system over headphones so if you feed the realiser with the corrected/EQd signal from your receiver the result should be good! But of course this is only possible for the number of channels and the sound formats that the receiver supports. For clarity: in this case you use the receiver as decoder.

The system you want to measure is 5.1?

I'm going to end up with systems eventually that are more than 5.1, it just happens to be the one I'd have easiest access to and I can take my time measuring.

 

[Richter Di]

It will be Monday. UPS only delivers Saturdays I guess if you purchase it as an upgrade. I probably should have asked James about that when I was dealing with paying for it. Looks like Monday for sure though.

Still awesome!

I’m sure I can track one down somewhere, just that this just turned into way more of a pain that I thought it was going to be.

Very painful. I really was hoping to do a one speaker measurement.
The other hope is they kept my October 2016 profile done in Paris, where I just drove to get it done.
In any other case I have to wait until enough people here (German, Dutch, Austrian, Switzerland, ...) and at hifi-forum.de have the unit and we can do one measurement together in the Munich Atmos studio.

 

[Evshrug]

@Got the Shakes
You’re a madman, but I can’t help but admire you. I wasn’t sure consumers (buying for personal use, not “pro” use) would be willing to support the full $4k price. You’re basically supporting the MSRP, and hopefully for the Smyth’s sake others follow in your footsteps.

And you know what? I think you’re going to be in for a treat. There were a couple of $4k headphones (playing off a system totaling higher than that) which were available for demo at the two CanJams (plus Munich High End), but each time the Realiser stole the show. Easily the most impressive thing for me.

I did NOT know that they were including a pre-loaded Atmos room. While not perfect without calibration, the SVS processing with a “generic measurement” was already superb and better than anything I’d heard up to that point. I was interested in the virtual surround, which like I said was industry-leading, but I was blown away and almost more impressed with how it made a semi-humble pair of Stax L300 sound warm and “wet” like the speakers at the show: I think their personalized EQ was also extremely impressive.

I suppose I should assume there isn’t a reason to fear the Smyths thought I was one of the cancelled, right? I was one of the early bird backers (I think I joined day 1, or maybe as soon as I got my paycheck), my payment already went out, and I get the Kickstarter update emails.

 

[audiohobbit]

And later at home connect the pre-outs of that same receiver - still calibrated to the speakers and room that you measured - to the analog inputs of your A16. The A16 simulates the uncorrected/non-EQd system over headphones so if you feed the realiser with the corrected/EQd signal from your receiver the result should be good! But of course this is only possible for the number of channels and the sound formats that the receiver supports. For clarity: in this case you use the receiver as decoder.

This is what I'm doing with my Ymaha Receiver and the A8 at the moment. The Yamaha has a 7.1 analog input but can't use the PEQ for those. So I "PRIRed" the system "raw". The Realiser acts like an uncorrected speaker system and the EQing is done in the AV-Receiver.

For the A16 with more than 8 channels this would also be possible but then you don't use the internal decoding capacity and have to feed it with 12 or more analog cinch-connections (cinch to 3.5 mm jack to be exact...)

IF the PEQs per channel will work as promised (they didn't mention in the update that this doesn't work) then you can copy the settings of the AV-Receiver to the Realiser (but this will also be problematic if you use automatic room correction that doesn't let you know the parameters).

and we can do one measurement together in the Munich Atmos studio.

As I said before, my info is that MSM can only use digital inputs in their cinema mastering suite so at the moment wouldn't be feasible.

Concerning digital measuring sweeps:
I think the problem here is that they have to be encoded in Dolby Atmos. I think that's a problem for Smyth at the moment and a nearly unsolvable problem for us because you can't just convert the 16 analog channels to digital for HDMI input, they have to be re-encoded to Atmos, and as it is at the moment with the A16, this has to happen "live", on the fly. -> AFAIK that's totally impossible for us normal users.
Even "offline" Atmos encoding isn't do-able with freeware or something affordable I think.

So if you have an Atmos-speaker system you have to find an amp for each speaker to drive it with an analog input from the A16.
As s.o. mentioned older AV-Receivers with 5 or 7 ch analog input can be bought for a small amount I think.
For me that would not be the problem. My Yamaha has a 7 ch analog input, I have an older Onkyo with 5 ch input and I got several (3 or 4 ) stereo amplifiers also.
But what I don't have is 12 loudspeakers. Just 7. So either I buy 4 more, or someone lend me some.

Or I still hope that you can combine PRIRs.

 

[hadron70]

[QUOTE="In any other case I have to wait until enough people here (German, Dutch, Austrian, Switzerland, ...) and at hifi-forum.de have the unit and we can do one measurement together in the Munich Atmos studio.[/QUOTE]

I contacted the Munich Atmos studio. They are not able to do measurements with an analog-only-output Realiser. The studio infrastructure simply does not support analog any more.

This seems to be the most critical point at the moment. Next week, when the first A16s will be delivered, we will know for sure what is actually possible and what is not. If HDMI and Blu-Ray PRIR measurements are really impossible at the moment, I think at least one of these modes needs to be added with the highest priority.

 

[Fox1977]

Has anyone asked Smyth Research specifically about this point, doing the sweeps ONLY via analog inputs, to get confirmation ? And if the feature of doing it via HDMI will be implemented in a forthcoming firmware ?

 

[Evshrug]

Hah! Sorry about the double post, but I think this is separate enough to warrant its own post –

I was searching through my email history to see what order # I was. Nothing saying what number I was... but I did get a confirmation for my order, one hour after the campaign started! I even tweeted about it:

https://twitter.com/evshrug/status/759913648886210561?s=21

 

[audiohobbit]

If you backed it on KS then you can view your pledge on KS and it tells you you're backer Number XX.
If you pre-ordered it than there's no way to know.