[blubliss]

For me, the HD600 has been an excellent combination with the A8 I've owned for the past 7.5 years.  Have never really liked the HD800 with the A8.

 

[Drumonron]

Meh, I'll give the A16 a try with the HD800, I am confident in it's abilities and don't need convincing that I do indeed love it.

 

[AppleheadMay]

Can this product be used with any headphone effectively or do we need HD800?
Currently I own Sony Z1R, HD600 and PSB M4U1 will they fare well with A16 or will I need to invest on HD800

 
 
According to James Smyth:
 

  We have primarily used the Stax SR-L300 and Sennheiser HD800 headphones. These headphones have two things in common, excellent sound quality and extreme comfort. If you are going to watch 2 hour movies, the latter overrides everything else. We also use Beyer dynamic DT770 closed headphones in the lab and have from time to time used the HD600 and HD650 headphones. All of these headphones work well. Just like for stereo music, closed headphones tend to be less spacious compared to open ones, but our virtualisation still works extremely well. Generally speaking, the better a headphone sounds to you using just stereo music, the better it will work for the Realiser.
 

 
 
My personal thought is that a HD800 would do well because it's a very spatial headphone and as I can easily get my hands one one I'll give it a try.
But I think I might prefer more bass for games and movies and for late night use a closed pair might be a good idea as well so I intend to use my Z1R primarily and that one is pretty spatial for a closed headphone as well.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

I think my SD modded HD800 will work well when I break down and buy this--if I break down and buy it.  I also think any Audeze LCD series will work well as far as sonics go, but some user will not find them comfortable. 

 

[Evshrug]

According to James Smyth:



My personal thought is that a HD800 would do well because it's a very spatial headphone and as I can easily get my hands one one I'll give it a try.
But I think I might prefer more bass for games and movies and for late night use a closed pair might be a good idea as well so I intend to use my Z1R primarily and that one is pretty spatial for a closed headphone as well.

You might get more bass with the Z1R... if you don't measure and equalize your headphones using the A16. The frequency curves are typically going to matter less, so... what does matter?

I've also been on Head-Fi for awhile, and in the 7.5 years I've explored different DSPs, I've found that a few things really help the surround experience to seem more "holographic." A headphone that is grainy is going to affect the sound even after EQ, so will a headphone that rolls off the bass or treble early (EQ can only change so much). The headphone's levels of distortion are going to matter more than frequency curves, as well as how quick the driver responds and changes direction, and having lower levels of ringing (as can be detected by square waves). Low Distortion, fast responsiveness (fast decay), and low ringing all contribute to the experience becoming more transparent to the original speakers or instruments. Ideally, you'd want a headphone that performs BETTER than the theater's speakers, so that the A16 can add the effects and distortion of the room.

A mid-fi headphone is not going to reproduce what $5000 or $20,000 in speakers can do, it's just not over-engineered to that level. It might be satisfying enough, go ahead and use it for your pleasure... but I highly recommend not bottlenecking the experience if you have the chance to try a more capable headphone that can be a better chameleon.

 

[MichaelJames99]

Curious.. how would you rank these for working best with the A16 just on movies?  Do all of these do well with bass (like handling the .1 part of a 7.4.1 mix)?
 
Hifiman HE-1000 or 1000 v2 

HifiMan Edition X v2
Mr. Speakers Ether Planar 
Sennheiser HD-800S
Sony Z1R
Audeze LCD‑3
Audeze LCD-X
Stax SR-007 Mk2  
Stax SR-L700
Oppo PM-1
Focal Utopia (if I can increase my budget)

 

[Richter Di]

Curious.. how would you rank these for working best with the A16 just on movies?  Do all of these do well with bass (like handling the .1 part of a 7.4.1 mix)?

Hifiman HE-1000 or 1000 v2 



HifiMan Edition X v2


Mr. Speakers Ether Planar 


[COLOR=222222]Sennheiser [/COLOR]HD-800S


Sony Z1R


[COLOR=222222]Audeze LCD‑3[/COLOR]


[COLOR=333333]Audeze LCD-X[/COLOR]


[COLOR=333333]Stax SR-007 Mk2 [/COLOR] 


Stax SR-L700


[COLOR=333333]Oppo PM-1[/COLOR]


[COLOR=333333]Focal Utopia (if I can increase my budget)[/COLOR]

My guess would be nobody can honestly say this.

 

[AppleheadMay]

My guess would be nobody can honestly say this.

 
Right guess, I'll be going with the Z1R for starters but will give all my cans a try as well as a HD800 loaner.

 

[jgazal]

(...) so that the A16 can add the effects and distortion of the room.

I see you are precisely referring to distortion of the room.
If you use an exponential sine sweep to capture a PRIR, can you reproduce the intermodulation distortion from the amplifier that was driving the speakers?

 

[RRod]

I see you are precisely referring to distortion of the room.
If you use an exponential sine sweep to capture a PRIR, can you reproduce the intermodulation distortion from the amplifier that was driving the speakers?

 
ESS spits out *harmonic* distortion terms rather directly after deconvolution, but as it's only playing one tone at a time it doesn't give you much for IMD. There are sweep methods for assessing IMD: you just need to have more than one tone going at once.

 

[Soundsgoodtome]

@Evshrug Would you put a deposit down for this processor? Or have you already? Considering it but want to hear from someone I've spoken to before I put the moneys down.

 

[Evshrug]

My guess would be nobody can honestly say this.

I would agree, but I will try anyway.

Hope I don't sound like a broken record, but the important thing is having headphones more transparent and able to outperform the speakers being measured. Which I felt the Stax L300 were doing, which was IMO surprising for their ~$750 price point for earspeaker and Amp combo. One of the Smyths (Stephen?) said that sometimes there's a rattle with the bass when literally it causes so much excursion that the thin film "driver" of the Stax hits the surface of the electromagnets on either side of the film, and of course that would sound different than speakers, but listening to the pretty loud Max Max clip (at a volume that was louder than I usually like) the issue never happened to me.

If BASS is MichaelJames99's major concern, I would say two things:
1.) "natural" bass dB levels of a headphone almost don't matter, because the A16 equalizes it as long as the headphone has the headroom. If a headphone's bass rolls off extremely early (which is not the case with any of the listed headphones), then it might exhibit extortion if EQ'd up too high. Again, a mom-issue for the headphones listed.

2.) Since the dB of bass doesn't matter, which as most audiophiles gain more and more experience they look for quality instead of quantity anyway, what does matter is if the headphone has a wide dynamic range of how much low end pressure it can create without distorting, and how "tight" the quality is because a speaker will almost certainly sound looser. It's one of those things... a tight headphone can sound loose if the audio is played back that way, but a loose headphone can't sound tighter just because it's being fed a very tight signal. Planar headphones (like the MrSpeakers, HiFiman, and Audeze headphones on MJ99's list) are generally considered some of the best bass quality headphones on the planet. It's personal choice, but again keep in mind there is a whole lot more to sound than just bass (or movies).

I see you are precisely referring to distortion of the room.
If you use an exponential sine sweep to capture a PRIR, can you reproduce the intermodulation distortion from the amplifier that was driving the speakers?

Possibly?
I'm not completely sure, but with a fully measured setup (PRIR, Headphone EQ), it records the difference of the original digital signal vs what your ears heard, so if the intermodulation distortion is audible from an individual speaker playing the sweep... possibly? Easier with more than one tone, as RRod said. Full disclosure, I'm just an enthusiast rather than employee or professional scientist, but the practical solution of recording what your ears hear really takes care of many known factors for how our ears perceive sound, and even some unknown unknowns if you catch my drift.
One thing that would be difficult to capture is how the sound waves interact and cancel each other out at certain points of the room... this system is based on sitting in one sweet spot, it cannot have the 4D effect that comes from walking through a 3D sound field (unless you're virtually walking through a game world, but those simulations are never that advanced).

@Evshrug
Would you put a deposit down for this processor? Or have you already? Considering it but want to hear from someone I've spoken to before I put the moneys down.

I WOULD put money down for this processor, I DID put money down for this processor in the first 3 minutes of the kickstarter going live, and despite high expectations I was still utterly impressed when I got to hear the prototype at CanJam NYC in February. I thought it would have excellent surround imaging, because I had seen the videos of people reacting to demos (and was a little skeptical of how impressed I would be since I am very used to different surround DSPs), but what took me off guard was how excellent the DSP made the Stax headphones... not sound like Stax. Or headphones. I mean, the Orpheus 2 at the Sennheiser Pop-up store was astonishing for how revealing and true-timbred it was, but the A16 was the stand-out demo of the show because it was so fundamentally different.

 

[jgazal]

(...)
Easier with more than one tone, as RRod said. (...)

If the Realiser A16 captures the PRIR of a given spot using an exponential sine sweep and, as I understood from RRod response, it wouldn't replicate IMD from the amplifiers/speakers being measured, but only the frequency response signature and decay of a speaker and the acoustical distortion introduced by room reflections and nodes, then I actually see such feature as an advantage, because dynamic compression and IMD would be now limited by the headphone transducer and respective amplifier and not by the room speakers and driving amplifiers.
Add that to bass direct playback modes and it can potentially sound better than that room measured as Sound on Sound already stated while reviewing the A8.

 

[RRod]

If the Realiser A16 captures the PRIR of a given spot using an exponential sine sweep and, as I understood from @RRod response, it wouldn't replicate IMD from the amplifiers/speakers being measured, but only the frequency response signature and decay of a speaker and the acoustical distortion introduced by room reflections and nodes, then I actually see such feature as an advantage, because dynamic compression and IMD would be now limited by the headphone transducer and respective amplifier and not by the room speakers and driving amplifiers.
Add that to bass direct playback modes and it can potentially sound better than that room measured as Sound on Sound already stated while reviewing the A8.

 
To clarify: IMD and HD are coming from the same underlying non-linearities (in a sense, HD is self-IMD). ESS will certainly give you some information about IMD, since the HD products will interact with the fundamental, and any reverb tones will interact with the sweep. But if these interacting signals are low-level then you will have a hard time quantifying IMD out of the noise of the system. So if your goal is to *exactly replicate* IMD of an amp, ESS won't get you there easily by itself. There are fancy maths you can do with it, though, that may help.
 
But in the end what you wrote is true: using ESS is a great way to factor distortion out of the impulse measurement at a given room location.

 

[esimms86]

Pardon me if this has already been discussed earlier in the thread but I wonder if anyone has tried or given thought to using the A8/A16 to use an Ambiophonics or Choueri BACCH system to make a PRIR. It should certainly be theoretically possible to do so and I at least would be willing to pay a premium (say, $1000 USD) for someone to allow me to use their rare and expensive BACCH system to make a PRIR. Food for thought as I await my A16 with Canjam 2017 PRIR to show up in the mail in 2-3 months.