Can anyone provide me direction of how I make the PRIR and in what format for use in the A16?
In short there are potentially 3 paths to your goal, and maybe you can try more than 1 of these:
1. Find someone with an A16 that is willing to help, offer to let this person make his/her own PRIR from your system as (part of) the "reward".
2. Get Smyth to provide you with suitable files for the asynchronous measurement method (and buy binaural microphones and a recording interface).
3. Buy binaural microphones and a recording interface and use jaakkopasanen's impulcifer to record sweep responses and create HRIRs.
About 1:
This would be the easiest and most straight forward solution I guess.
[Edit: actually, best would be to have a A16 at hand and a asynchronous PRIR measurement file (for 7.2.4), because otherwise there still are the usual problems concerning analog inputs and not having the AVR's DSP in the signal path.
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By now there are quite a few A16s out in the field. In what city (and what country) do you live? You can always try asking here in the thread whether someone with an A16 lives close to you and wants to help you.
About 2&3:
To be able to use the Impulcifer sweep responses or recorded sweep responses from the asynchronous signals we will have to find a way to inject signals into the A16 microphone inputs. For example with a suitable so called "Direct Injection Box" or "D.I. Box" for short. To find a suitable D.I. Box we must get to know the specs of the microphone inuts, so we are depending on Smyth to provide those to us. However that would be a problem of later concern, you can do sweep recordings or Imulcifer measurements without having the solution to that now.
More about 3:
This would be the most complicated solution (if you want all your channels and head tracking). But one advantage is that you can already use a 7.1 channel non-headtracked version without having your A16.
With Impulcifer you create so called HRIRs. (And normally you use those with other software, for example HeSuVi) It doesn't support head tracking or more than 7.1 channels but that can be solved by recording several HRIRs, for different subsets of your channels, and for different lookangles. You can for example make a few 7.1 HRIRs of your 7.1 basis (with one of the subs, and do the other sub with the other speakers, or let the two subs run together as one) for a number of different lookangles. In fact with Impulcifer some things are a little bit easier than with the A16 because Impulcifier provides the sweeps as multichannel LPCM over HDMI, so no worrying about connections, replugging, not having your receivers DSP in the path!
For the height channels you would have to make a seperate set of HRIRs, now there is a bit of a problem with the receiver's DSP but there is a solution I think:
-swap the speaker connections: connect the height speakers for example to the surround and surround back outputs of your receiver
-let your receiver do a new auto callibration (hope you can save and recall your current settings, otherwise later you will have to re-calibrate your receiver in the normal situation)
-now do the Impulcifer HRIR measurements (just 7.1 again, you will have the front channels double but that doesn't matter).
Very important is to exactly document what is in what file!
I don't have time now to explain in detail how you would use these files later, but don't worry about that now!
@jaakkopasanen: I assume the sweep responses for individual channels can always be isolated from the files into a seperate file by copying a certain fixed time-window from a 7.1 sweep response file? If that is the case then there is some more flexibility in how to run the A16 sweeps through for example HeSuVi later. For example if only 2 analog input channels are available on the pc. At the moment it would be too complicated and time consuming for m8o to record all sweep responses (for all channels and all lookangles) seperately or in 2 channel pairs.