For those of you that like to experiment, I can tell you that the Smyth Realiser is among the most interesting products I have ever messed with for headphone use. Basically, you insert tiny headphones into your ear canals and do a multichannel room measurement. The Smyth Realizer plays sweeps through each speakers and the mics in your ears record those. It then builds convolution filters and creates a file called a PRIR. It creates another file called a HPEQ from mic measurements taken from your headphones. Together, these files form a personalized measurement of your room and your headphones. Once you have all that done, the fun begins. Because the match between playing multichannel music through the speakers in your room…and the experience of listening to the same track through your headphones is uncanny. They sound identical.
I’m only letting the Smyth Realizer work in the digital domain without any DA or AD conversions. I’m feeding it multichannel digital…letting it do its thing…and then feeding a 2 channel spdif output to the Rossini Apex.
I have always been intrigued by Smyth Realiser. A unique product but one that does not seem to have made it to this side of the pond. Please let is know how you get on with it. A very interesting experiment.
It once struck me as expensive but the headphone market prices have expanded over the years and now it seems not far from many upper end 'phones or amplifiers.
I’d have to say, the Realiser is perhaps the most interesting audio product I have used since I got intrigued with Bob Carver’s C-9 Sound Hologram generator in the early 80’s. That device added some cross feed and other modifications that led to a wider deeper soundstage that could really play some psychoacoustic head games.
The Realiser plays those same tricks on you. With headphones on, you hear a soundstage out in front and very wide. The remote allows you to listen independently through the phones to each individual speaker in a multichannel setup. The localization of each speaker as heard through the headphones is uncanny.
At first, I thought I was losing a good bit of resolution with the Realiser in the path prior to the Rossini Apex. However, once I built the two files (PRIR and HPEQ) and loaded them in, a majority of the detail returned.