[Got the Shakes]

Can you assign the same PRIR to all the presets?

You can create virtual rooms for all three formats from the same PRIR, but the A16 doesn’t allow you to take a Dolby room and assign it to handle PCM. If you want the same speaker layout for all three formats best I can tel you have to create it three times, once as a Dolby room, once as a DTS room, and once as a PCM room.

 

[esimms86]

"How might one consult with any kind of Customer/Technical Support for the A16?"

The correct way according to the smyth site is to us the contact page. But I think that just goes to James which wouldn't help but you can give it a try.
https://smyth-research.com/contact/

But some thing else you might want to try is look at the staff page and find the person responsible for the subject you are having trouble with, take their first name and prepend it to @smyth-research.com and see if it works. But no one should be bugging the developers with non technical questions like "where is my realizer?" or that route will get blocked for sure. I am not sure if it will work but it is worth a try.

https://smyth-research.com/about/

Unfortunately, there is no customer/technical support person listed on their official team. There’s just James, who is already doing a far suboptimal job of keeping order, pre-order customers and Kickstarter backers informed. Steven and Andy are listed as the folks behind the as of yet to launch Realiser Exchange but their may (or may not) be limited to the technical work of the RE(as opposed to customer support regarding the RE).

Hopefully, Lorr Kramer is still on the team and he will hopefully have some degree of staff dedicated to answering user’s questions.

In a perfect world the first A16 would have shipped to @dsperber, followed by other long time users of the A8. I don’t know if Darin Fong has one on order(though I can’t imagine that he doesn’t), but Darin probably has more experience with making PRIRs than anyone else outside of the Smyth brothers and Lorr. This is how I would have done the product rollout from a marketing perspective if it were up to me. I would have also brought in dealers for a weekend session on the A16 so that they could be better informed to support their customers. Perhaps Gilles has already been provided with that sort of training.

Incidentally, regarding the latest post from @Got the Shakes, I wonder if CanJam and Munich, etc., PRIRs will ship pre-installed on A16s with that Preset already sorted into 3 separate rooms.

 

[sander99]

You can create virtual rooms for all three formats from the same PRIR, but the A16 doesn’t allow you to take a Dolby room and assign it to handle PCM. If you want the same speaker layout for all three formats best I can tel you have to create it three times, once as a Dolby room, once as a DTS room, and once as a PCM room.

I will add to that, before someone thinks you have to measure the same room three times: creating a (virtual) room is just an activity in the user interface, and part of that activity is selecting speakers from one or more PRIRs. So effectively you can use the same virtual speakers in several rooms, and in several presets.
And a small recap of the overall structure:
You can have a number of presets,
each preset can have three rooms,
in each room are speakers from one or more PRIRs.

 

[Got the Shakes]

I will add to that, before someone thinks you have to measure the same room three times: creating a (virtual) room is just an activity in the user interface, and part of that activity is selecting speakers from one or more PRIRs. So effectively you can use the same virtual speakers in several rooms, and in several presets.
And a small recap of the overall structure:
You can have a number of presets,
each preset can have three rooms,
in each room are speakers from one or more PRIRs.

Yes that’s an important clarification that I forgot about.

 

[audiohobbit]

Yes, that's my understanding as well while reading the manual (please all read the manual!)
And I think I can add the following:
The requirement that you can use a speaker of a PRIR in different (as in Dolby, DTS-X etc.) rooms is that the speaker label is available in all those rooms. See the table on p. 95ff.
There you can see that DTSX can have all the labels that Dolby Atmos has (e.g. Ltf - Left top front) but DTS-X can have additional speakers with labels that Atmos don't support, e.g. Lh - Left height or Lhs - Left height side. If you labelled a speaker as Lhs while creating a PRIR you can't use this speaker in an Atmos room, even if the position of the speaker would be correct for Atmos (but then it would have been labelled wrong by the user).

For a correct Atmos setup, up to 9.1.6, all speakers, if labelled correctly, can be used in Atmos and DTS-X (and PCM) rooms.
So the labelling of the speaker before creating a PRIR is a crucial point!

What I still don't get are the angular position requirements of the setups.
If you look at the table on p. 95 ff. there are azimuth and elevation angles mentioned for each speaker (which are sometimes odd), in the Notes it says:

The azimuth and elevation angles are default values–
the angles can be changed to match a physical loudspeaker layoutduring a PRIR measurement.

But I think, and this also mentioned in the manual, that these angles are just for info and are not used in any processing - at least not in the SVS processing.
The decoder assume specific angles and no one knows these at the moment (maybe even not the Smyths. Maybe MDS, the board manufacturer? Are there whitepapers or spec sheets?)

 

[sander99]

I was wondering: can't you change those speaker labels later if you made a mistake with the initial labeling?

 

[Got the Shakes]

I was wondering: can't you change those speaker labels later if you made a mistake with the initial labeling?

I haven’t found a way to. I screwed up the first PRIR I made because the rear speakers were labeled wrong. Only way I could figure out how to fix it was to rename them before taking a new PRIR. It’s entirely possible that I missed how to name after the fact though.

 

[audiohobbit]

Haven't read this either and they noted it in yellow in the manual to be important to take care of the labelling before PRIR measurement.

 

[audiohobbit]

As this just popped up on the Kickstarter comments:
Chapter 5.3.6.3 Audio bypass
When enabled,this switches the HDMI audio signal as well as the HDMI video signal.

How do you understand this? I must admit I don't get it.
The rest of chapter 5.3.6 is ok, assign an HDMI (video) input to a non HDMI input. But this last paragraph I don't understand.

 

[sander99]

As this just popped up on the Kickstarter comments:
Chapter 5.3.6.3 Audio bypass
When enabled,this switches the HDMI audio signal as well as the HDMI video signal.

How do you understand this? I must admit I don't get it.
The rest of chapter 5.3.6 is ok, assign an HDMI (video) input to a non HDMI input. But this last paragraph I don't understand.

I have a strong feeling they misformulated something here, I thought of a few interpretations but they all don't make sense after thinking them through.

Against better judgement I hope it just enables audio pass through over HDMI like suggested in the kickstarter comment...
[Edit: but that also doesn't make sense: why seperate switches for all non-HDMI inputs?]
(This could easily be checked by @Got the Shakes, if he doesn't mind we call on him every time?)

 

[Got the Shakes]

As this just popped up on the Kickstarter comments:
Chapter 5.3.6.3 Audio bypass
When enabled,this switches the HDMI audio signal as well as the HDMI video signal.

How do you understand this? I must admit I don't get it.
The rest of chapter 5.3.6 is ok, assign an HDMI (video) input to a non HDMI input. But this last paragraph I don't understand.

I have a strong feeling they misformulated something here, I thought of a few interpretations but they all don't make sense after thinking them through.

Against better judgement I hope it just enables audio pass through over HDMI like suggested in the kickstarter comment...
[Edit: but that also doesn't make sense: why seperate switches for all non-HDMI inputs?]
(This could easily be checked by @Got the Shakes, if he doesn't mind we call on him every time?)

I can test again when I get home, but I did play around with this last week. It is a bit hard to explain, but I'll try. Lets say you have a Oppo UHD player that you connect to the A16 via HDMI and 16 channel analogs. To get the 16 channel sound to work, you need to select "analog" as the source input. For A16 to pass the video to the tv it needs to do so via HDMI so you need to set the HDMI that you want to correlate with the analog input that way when you select analog as the source the A16 knows which of the HDMI ports to take video from and send to the tv. Same could hold true for connecting your PC to the A16 via USB for sound and HDMI for video.

I should also mention that I never found the audio bypass toggle to actually do anything in the few minutes I messed with it last week.

 

[audiohobbit]

Yes, this is clear, as I already said: Assign HDMI (video) in to an audio source that is not HDMI.
But what does the slider "Audio bypass" do?

As we already guessed, it seems to be the hardware that doesn't allow HDMI audio pass-through.

IF your TV can accept video via HDMI and audio via another connection then you could use the mix-down-function and connect for example the analogue headphone out to the TV to get the audio there.
I'm not sure if this is possible with TVs.

 

[eggmansr71]

Anyone who has the HD800 and gone through the headphone eq process. Was curious if that process took the high-frequency spike out of the headphone or what is your opinion of the correction is does?

 

[CanMad]

I have heard nothing further from James. Neither have I been contacted by a courier company. James emailed me last Tuesday telling me my realiser was ready to ship. Mrmac was contacted by the courier in a similar time frame.

 

[CaptainFunk]

I have heard nothing further from James. Neither have I been contacted by a courier company. James emailed me last Tuesday telling me my realiser was ready to ship. Mrmac was contacted by the courier in a similar time frame.

That is disappointing to hear. It seems like they didn't even manage to ship 10 units to Kickstarter backers. They also didn't post any shipping updates on Kickstarter, I guess because the number is just too small.