[sahmen]

You make it more complicated than it is. People who had the demo often say "I could pinpoint the speakers precisely" because of the part where the speakers are solo'd. When all virtual speakers are playing together they just sound like real speakers playing together, and at that moment you can not pinpoint the speakers anymore (if the real speakers were well set up).


To go from one virtual speaker to more virtual speakers the straightforward simple principle of superposition can be applied: adding the stereo signals of the individual virtual speakers together to one stereo signal. It really is that simple.

I certainly hope you're right on all points, and that things are really that simple. I think the problem I really have has to do with having to think of these operational procedures in the abstract, without having even seen an A-16 before "in the flesh," talk less of attempting to operate one in person. Things work a whole lot better for me when I have the product before me, and I can put it through its paces.

 

[audiohobbit]

You make it more complicated than it is. People who had the demo often say "I could pinpoint the speakers precisely" because of the part where the speakers are solo'd. When all virtual speakers are playing together they just sound like real speakers playing together, and at that moment you can not pinpoint the speakers anymore (if the real speakers were well set up).

Exactly. I would say the same.
I can understand the doubts if somone never heard a Realiser.
When listening stereo for example I hear a virtual soundstage between the virutal speakers without locating the speakers like in reality.
BUT if a sound comes only from one speaker, like in some recordings, then you can locate the speaker, this is the same in reality.

wonder if this 24 ch ATMOS is correct... sure shows the BBC room with 24 ch

Could be 2 Options:
1. Main speakers are from the BBC PRIR, and others from a different PRIR.
I noticed that what the A16 shows in this screen seems to depend on the main speakers. I use rooms that are mixed from different PRIRs and what the A16 shows in this screen is the PRIR from the main speakers, L/R (I think).
2. I have to look at the documentation of those real BBC and Surrey rooms, I linked these in the thread in my sig. Some of these rooms got more speakers than are in the PRIRs on the A16 right now. So it could be that the "A24" gets updated PRIRs from these rooms.
I may ask Stephen in time (when the FW-Update is released, at the moment he seems to be very busy and I'm already bothering him with some questions about async measurements that are important to me at the moment).
Someone asked about the upmixer: I already asked him if there will be an updated DS Upmixer with the new boards, and he said no. Purpose of my question was that I read somewhere that the new DSU also uses the front wides which the implementation on the A16 does not. So this will not change. But I didn't ask about using all those other speakers.

I think it involved lots of plugging and unplugging.

With 2 speakers you do not need to unplug and replug all the time, if you make several PRIRs, every PRIR with 2 channels. A listening room can be populated from different PRIRs, so that's not a big problem.
We did this last year. Although it was a room with a 5.1.4 Atmos-Setup, we only used the 2 front L/R speakers and 2 of the top speakers. This has some advantages.

We plugged the L/R speakers to the 1/2 outputs and left it that way. You have to reconfigure the PRIR Sound rooms then several times and reassign the speaker (labels) you want to measure to the outputs 1 and 2.
We used the headtracker in HT-Assist Mode and moved the set top around and rotated the listner:
1. Listener looks 0 deg to the front. Set top is at 0 deg front. L/R gets recorded.
2. Listener looks 30 deg to the right, set top is moved 30 deg. Then the R speaker becomes the C, the other one was recorded as SW (because all speakers were bassmanaged with a DBA, so effectively every speaker fullrange).
3. The listener looks 90 deg to the (right) side. Set Top moved to 90 deg. Then the R speaker becomes the Lw (left wide, relative angle to the listener -60 deg), the L speaker becomes the Ls (at relative angle -120 degree, this is a left surround for a 5.1 setup).
4. Listener looks at 120 deg. Then the L speaker is directly left of the listener (at -90 deg. relative angle) and becomes the Lss (left side surround for 7.1/9.1), the R speaker is at relative -150 deg and becomes a Lb (left back)
5. and 6.: same as 3. and 4. but to the other side to get Rw, Rs, Rss, Rb

->so you have 6 PRIRs with a speaker every 30 deg (excep a back center, which will be rarely needed) and you have the correct side surrounds for 7.1 and more, and the correct surrounds for 5.1
And by rotating the listener all speakers are at the same distance and form a perfect circle. Often in normal rooms the side and back surrounds are closer to the listener and also often inferior to the fronts, and also often have inferior acoustics.

Then we took 2 of the 4 top speakers and created 4 tops, by rotating the listener once about 180 deg.
The listener sits on the floor for this, so the distance to the tops is greater then when sitting on a chair.
This is another advantage, because with normal ceilings or in most basement rooms (where home cinemas often are installed) even lower ceilings the tops are relatively close to the listener. By sitting on the floor we can maximize this distance.

So we end up with 8 PRIRs but as I said it's not a problem, a room can be created out of several different PRIRs.

We avoid constant unplugging and replugging and also moving around the speakers (like proposed in the Smyth video, which is the most complicated way you can do this...!)

 

[Om ma Ni]

(because all speakers were bassmanaged with a DBA, so effectively every speaker fullrange).

Could you give more details regarding this bass management option which i guess is the Direct Bass one?..sounds like the IMAX Enhanced rendering spec with all the spkrs on full range so no LFE etc..?

And by rotating the listener all speakers are at the same distance and form a perfect circle. Often in normal rooms the side and back surrounds are closer to the listener and also often inferior to the fronts, and also often have inferior acoustics.

Is this the "perfect" spkrs positioning as the auditor is in the central point of the sphere of sound? Or should we try to stick to the dolby atmos reference spkrs positionning model on their website in term of angle and distance? If we use the circle layout for the spkrs, how can we determine the distance for the top spkrs when it comes to more than 4 and also the distance for the L and R wide spkrs as they should be in a wider point than the others in the circle?

 

[audiohobbit]

Could you give more details regarding this bass management option which i guess is the Direct Bass one?..sounds like the IMAX Enhanced rendering spec with all the spkrs on full range so no LFE etc..?

No no, you got this wrong. I was referring to the Bass management of the real loudspeakers in the real room where we measured the PRIRs.
The owner has Neumann KH310 studio speakers in the front. And he uses a DBA (Double Bass Array: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bass_array). Every speaker is bass managed with this DBA, so every speaker acts as a fullrange channel. So we don't need any bassmanagement inside the Realiser. We just have to record one of the "fullrange"-Speakers as Subwoofer, in this case only as LFE channel used. (We unplugged the active speaker in this case and recorded only the DBA that runs up to 120 Hz. Just to be sure that the LFE doesn't contain anything above 120 Hz).

Is this the "perfect" spkrs positioning as the auditor is in the central point of the sphere of sound?

Yes, this is always the desired Layout for Surround. Circle in one dimension, sphere in dimensions.

Or should we try to stick to the dolby atmos reference spkrs positionning model on their website in term of angle and distance?

In terms of angles, yes, more or less. In terms of distance no. Sphere is always better, but not often feasible in real rectangular rooms. This is what Dolby shows here.
All speakers equal and at the same distance is the basic theory of surround. Everything else are compromises.

If we use the circle layout for the spkrs, how can we determine the distance for the top spkrs when it comes to more than 4 and also the distance for the L and R wide spkrs as they should be in a wider point than the others in the circle?

ALL speakers should be on the surface on the sphere, your head in the center. The front wides also.

And by the way, that is what the A16 at the moment does automatically.

I asked Stephen a lot about delaying speakers that are in reality closer to the listener.

He said

Presently the A16 does not render speaker delays. I have not got round to that yet. So what that means is, all speakers you measure are placed at exactly the same distance. In other words if your head is in the centre of a sphere, then the speakers are all on the surface of that sphere. This applies even if the speakers come from different PRIRs, the timing between them is always matched.

You do not need to worry about delays, they will all be the same even if the speaker is pyhsically closer. The only reason you would preceive a difference in distance is because of the ratio of direct to reverberant energy in the PRIR. The greater the reverberant energy the further away the speaker appears, even if its distance does not actually change.

He wasn't more specific than that, but I think what the A16 does is to align the beginning of the impulse of all speakers, so that all impulses arrive at your ear at the same time.

What remains is the distance perception by the room acoustic, as he said the ratio between direct and reverberant energy. In a normal room playing one speaker alone and blindfolded, you can still perceive the approximate distance of the speaker. Only in an anechoic room witho only direct sound and no reverberartions this would not work.

 

[esimms86]

This is a very interesting discussion but, to my mind, has little to do with my experience of the A16. I can turn my head toward a virtual loudspeaker and localize it in space when there is only one "speaker" producing sound at a given time. I can do the same when a voice or instrument is panned, say, hard left or hard right. The Beatles' '"Rubber Soul" album(with instruments panned to one side and vocals to the other), "Led Zeppelin II," and The Who's opening sequence in the song "Pinball Wizard" come to mind. The illusion of having live musicians in the room, however, can be quite difficult to achieve using a real speaker setup(note that countless audiophiles have been chasing that experience for decades). Some say that speakers like the Quad 57 can do this, and horn speakers are said to also be excellent at giving the illusion of listening to a live band. Anyway, if one were to successfully capture a PRIR in a optimally set up room with such speakers then the PRIR listening experience should be quite closely akin to the listening experience you would have had in the actual room. Of course, a lot of popular music is recorded as a carefully crafted, produced experience and not meant to be perceived in the same way as a live event so you also to take that into account as well. Still, this in no way diminishes the experiences of listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" in 4.0 or 5.1 sound or "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in Dolby Atmos via an A16.

 

[bpinnell]

Has anyone noticed oddities in the SPDIF output levels? I understand it is variable. But I have set the volume to 79 and then even adjusted it in the setting menu to 99, and the output level seems low. I also had to make sure the device I was connecting was set to 48khz or else there was strange pulsating spikes.

 

[audiohobbit]

FW 1.90 is released!

On upmixing with the new hardware:

Dolby Surround up-mixing can also be specified for sound rooms up to 24 channels. Our tests
show that all the new speaker positions are used by the up-mixer except the Lw, Rw, Lsc and Rsc
speakers

So seems that the wides will still not be used, as I had already heard from Stephen, but all the other channels, except for the side centers, but these are channels you only may need with a screen 15 m wider or more (Atmos in real cinemas...)

 

[Fox1977]

Thanks from the news... I hope it means that now they can focus on shipping again...

 

[Got the Shakes]

Very nice. The layout they provided in the CentroControl app looks nice. Got it downloaded and the template loaded quite quickly. Now if I only had my A16 back to actually test out how controlling it over IP works lol.

 

[audiohobbit]

I'm still waiting on the info from Stephen if and where to get the Android App from Demopad that they're talking about on their webpage.
Would be a pity if this would only work on Apple Devices.

Of course with the right software you can design your own apps/GUIs but that is a lot of work.

What really will come in handy is this new "Override preamble IDs" functionality for asyncmeasurements.

By using the override feature, it is possible to measure any A16 speaker position by playing
standard Async layouts such as 2ch, 5,1ch or 7.1ch from a BluRay player. For example, ch1
and ch2 outputs of an AV receiver/processor ordinarily drive the left front and right front
speakers respectively. If these loudspeakers were temporarily moved to the Lsc and Rsc
positions and the first two speaker IDs in the active sound room changed to Lsc and Rsc,
then if the override is enabled whilst making a measurement using a regular 2ch (L, R) Async
track, the PRIR will correctly assign the virtual speakers with IDs Lsc and Rsc. The same
technique can be used to measure overhead or height speakers or any other speaker not
defined in regular 2.0, 5.1, 7.1 layouts.

This means if for example you have a 7.1 system you can measure the normal 7.1 speakers with a 7.1 async file, and then rearrange your speakers, move the L and R to the Lw and Rw position and the 4 surrounds to the ceiling, and you can room correct these positions with your AVR, and then you can measure these new speaker positions with the same 7.1 async track (or a 5.1 track would be sufficient here), you just need to reassign the channels in the PRIR sound room.
The preamble of the async file no longer fixes the speaker setup, so you don't need a gazillion different files for different speaker setups.
Only for the different look angle combinations still different async files would be needed.

Now would be the right time to release a bunch of async files to the public...

 

[Got the Shakes]

I'm still waiting on the info from Stephen if and where to get the Android App from Demopad that they're talking about on their webpage.
Would be a pity if this would only work on Apple Devices.

Of course with the right software you can design your own apps/GUIs but that is a lot of work.

What really will come in handy is this new "Override preamble IDs" functionality for asyncmeasurements.


This means if for example you have a 7.1 system you can measure the normal 7.1 speakers with a 7.1 async file, and then rearrange your speakers, move the L and R to the Lw and Rw position and the 4 surrounds to the ceiling, and you can room correct these positions with your AVR, and then you can measure these new speaker positions with the same 7.1 async track (or a 5.1 track would be sufficient here), you just need to reassign the channels in the PRIR sound room.
The preamble of the async file no longer fixes the speaker setup, so you don't need a gazillion different files for different speaker setups.
Only for the different look angle combinations still different async files would be needed.

Now would be the right time to release a bunch of async files to the public...

With the UI in the Centro Control app I'd say on iOS it's only intuitive on an iPad. You can't shirk down the UI the Smyths provided (unless I missed how to, but two finger pinch doesn't work) to the size of an iPhone screen so you'd have to do a lot of scrolling to even get to something like all of the available inputs to choose on the A16.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

With the UI in the Centro Control app I'd say on iOS it's only intuitive on an iPad. You can't shirk down the UI the Smyths provided (unless I missed how to, but two finger pinch doesn't work) to the size of an iPhone screen so you'd have to do a lot of scrolling to even get to something like all of the available inputs to choose on the A16.

There are a lot of Android tablets out there as well. I, for one, will be hyper pissed if the long-promised Network Gui only works in an Apple environment.

 

[Got the Shakes]

There are a lot of Android tablets out there as well. I, for one, will be hyper pissed if the long-promised Network Gui only works in an Apple environment.

Yeah I know they exist, hell an Android app could even be sideloaded on a cheap Kindle Fire I would think if someone needed a pretty affordable tablet. What I was poorly trying to say was that if the situation is the same on Android as iOS, it will be barely usable on a phone vs a tablet. I have the largest sized iPhone 11 and like 30% of the UI at most fits on the screen at once.

 

[audiohobbit]

Please note:
This is not THE long promised "Network GUI".

This is a first step for controlling the A16 via Network with TCP commands like many other devices. These are raw commands and you need your own GUI. As I already wrote, control systems like Crestron can do this or I think iRule for example.
The GUI that has been programmed using the Demopad Designer and the Centro Control App is just a "goodie".
Everyone can design his own GUIs with several software systems out there.
And as one can read on the Demopad website, there should exist also a Centro Control Android App, but not in the Google Store and Stephen wanted to ask them how to get it.

The final goal should still be the originally proposed control via web browser, this works a bit different: A webserver will run inside the A16 and you can run a webpage with every web browser in your network, regardless of the operating system.

 

[VandyMan]

I heard back from James Smyth on the Mac/USB issues that I reported:

"Yes we have tested this and have realized that the Mac operating system Catalina does not work with the A16.
We would advise if possible for you to use an older OS. Currently we are in discussion with the USB company to get this problem fixed ASAP."