When I used to browse the Head-Fi site, there was spotty mention of the Smyth Realiser. For the (majority) of audiophiles, soundstage and imaging (localization of instruments, etc) seem to matter a lot. I don’t care that much about all of that, but it did make me curious about this device. At AXPONA we finally experienced a demo and it was…well, read on.
This is a device which has been evolving and improving with time and the latest generation was on display. It creates a completely accurate multichannel sound field through a pair of headphones. It was startling to experience because it really works, and works perfectly. This was not simply amazing, it was f**king amazing. But it is even more clever than that. Turn your head to the side, anywhere, or look up or down. It is still exactly like doing it without the headphones.
The show experience is naturally intimate because only one listener at a time can hear it. Dave and I made a pair of appointments for Sunday. I took some images which I will share here because in this case a picture is really worth a thousand words. The hardware is setup microphones and such, a custom Smyth computer, a minimal Stax amp, and for this demo a modest low end Stax pair. The big deal is naturally the software.
You sit in a chair surrounded in three axes by speakers. This particular iteration was set up as a sixteen channel Atmos configuration, which for the show was running at twelve channels. Definitely the best multichannel system most of us will probably ever hear. The setup happens once you are seated. Some tones are swept, measurements are input to the software, and you select a movie clip to play/hear. You put on the headphones and listen, and you can take them off anytime to hear the speakers (which switch on and off instantaneously when you do). The setup is done for each listener in each space it is installed in. It ends up precisely engineered to your exact requirements and situation. That’s why the appointments for a demo. They do the entire software setup each time. It only took a minute or two.
It freaked out everyone because you could not detect any difference between the speaker and the headphone presentation. None; it is really spooky. There is an eight-channel version too, which would do whatever one could want for music. The A-16 would be a home theater user’s wet dream. For those who perceive and are bothered by the headphone experience seeming to make the sound come from between your ears in your head, this system eliminates that. You can figure out why I'm sure.
http://smyth-research.com/index.html
http://smyth-research.com/downloads/...%20%202017.pdf
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