With OOYH your mileage may vary. Darin has about 25 presets and I've tried most of them. Some were awful for me, and others I found were great. I suspect this is because they were done with different heads which have very different HRTFs.
Bottom line is if you can find an OOYH preset whose HRTF closely matches your own, you've found something which will greatly enhance your enjoyment of headphone listening.
Is it the equal of the SVS Realizers? I suspect not, but remember the retail price of the A16 will be $2000, which is roughly 14 times the price of OOYH which is $149 with one preset.
Also if a product such as OOYH were to add Head tracking and a means to take and capture PRIRs while remaining a strictly software based system (except for the binaural in ear mics and head tracker, of course), it could undoubtedly sell for a great deal less the the SVS Realizers and, given the processing power of modern PCs, undoubtedly match its performance as well.
It puzzles me why Smyth does not actually offer this alternative to consumers on its own. Inasmuch as it could probably preempt any competitor and put itself in a dominant market position, and maybe create a mass market phenomenon on the order of THS or Dolby sound related processing products. Certainly seems like a quicker and surer way to make tons of money for the inventors than offering a single purpose, ultra expensive, processor in a box to a tiny fragment of the already miniscule high end headphone audio market.
I am not an expert in the movie, gaming or audio industry (so I may say things that are plain wrong) and sorry to derail the thread, but I believe there is an alternative view to your post.
Potential buyers can be divided into several groups, but consider cinephiles, gamers and audiophiles.
Hardware or software purchase is primarily driven by content.
Cinephiles buy blue ray discs with Dolby, DTS or Auro, because those are the standards chosen by the movie industry to distribute their motion files.
And those audio codecs were probably chosen by the industry to solve the acoustics challenges of audio reproduction for a large audience in movie theaters (if an array of transducers and beamforming at each seat were available before, the choice could have been other; a similar issue occurs with audio playback in car cockpit/cabins).
How many cinephiles have network attached storage of movie files? If they do, how many use network ready blue ray players? How many of them output video from the PC to a high definition television or projector? How many of them do buy multichannel receivers (and speakers) with a DSP capable of running the SVS algorithm by itself?
What are the platforms in which the most popular video games run in? Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo or PCs?
Does the potential buyer want to keep both the main platform and the personal computer running at the same time?
Do the personal computers owned by such potential buyers have HDMI or S/PDIF input?
The Realiser A8 may have had more success in professional audio industry due to a few factors: studios with good acoustics are expensive to build; the users had the appropriate repertoire to understand the full potential of the algorithm; although declining, DSP chips were costly.
That said, I see the advantages brought by Smyth Research to the audiophile niche more like "positive externalities".
Audiophiles that like two channel content playback with loudspeakers would rather buy a crosstalk cancellation DSP or wave field synthesis or a combination of both, if he/she is not a purist that do not want DSP. Even adopting such option, the two channel content may be not optimized for such method of playback.
So finally we get to you and me, people that - I believe - want to listen to music with headphone externalization. Are we stuck to any platform/media/codec such as DVD-Audio or SACD? Do we want to have a PC as a primary content source?
Now that those groups are identified, how many potential buyers are in each of them? How many out there have the same aim as you and me?
So eventually we would assume that the hardware/software DSP externalization provider might no be so free to choose between a hardware based product or a solely software product if such provider wants to attend the maximum number of potential buyers.
Now consider the cost of producing one additional OOYH and one Realiser A16 (marginal cost, including royalties to Dolby, DTS, Auro and Illusonic) and the number of units both are selling.
I would not be surprised if the profit of both are similar for very different technical and intellectual challenges surmounted.
Is there anything preventing the DSP externalization providers to launch
both hardware and software based products? Why would you assume the risk/cost of software copyright infringement and enforcement if you already have the costs (fixed and marginal) of producing hardware units?
I invite you to watch Home Theater Geek episode 340 where Smyth Research, Dts Headphone X and OOYH products are mentioned. I wonder why Peter Otto, Chief Scientific Officer at Comhear, says he is familiar with two of them. Which two do you think he is referring to?
People, do not worry. End of vacation. Won't post text walls like this one anymore.
Edit: References to wave field synthesis and bacch were wrong.