Sanctuary
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2011
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I don’t suppose you’ve taken your A16 to your friend’s theatre and measured a PRIR there? Because if you haven’t, how do you expect your A16 to replicate the same room sound, or if not the room sound, the “openness”? I absolutely love my Omega 96’s, but my own speakers are at anywhere from 110” to 130” from the MLP, and there’s a big open room space behind. So pure Omega 96 listening is never as “open” for me as my own PRIR. I would also venture to guess that other A16 customers would find listening with my PRIR too “open,” too much reverb.
I actually have, on multiple separate occasions with the A8 at least and in multiple different locations. In most of the settings the A8 didn't really sound near as good as what I could hear in real-time with the speakers. The rooms themselves were nowhere near optimal however for recording purposes, but even capturing the room "defects" did not translate into how the speakers or room actually sounded in real-time even with crappy acoustics.
I spent close to two hundred hours doing this as well, take after take after take until I finally landed on something acceptable at the time in each location, and still they were only ever somewhat convincing (as in tricking me into believing I was listening to the actual speakers) when I had speakers in front of me to look at. The differences between the A8 and A16 aren't significant enough either that the recording of a 5.1 or 7.1 setup would have a night and day difference in sound between the two. There is a difference, and I can only attribute it to the differences in the mics, and possibly some small alterations in how the two units run their captures, but they aren't significant enough to make something go from not sounding open, to sounding absolutely the same as real speakers.
Even recently I was able get get some PRIRs done in a studio setting with my A8, and it still doesn't sound like the real thing. The positional cues are all fine, and the distances seem pretty close, but it still doesn't sound anywhere near as open as the real thing.
Are your speakers in the same room you normally listen to your A16 in, and are you in the same listening position when using the A16 as you are when you listen to your speakers? That does make a pretty big difference for some. It definitely did for me in one location I used in 2021. I was almost convinced. Then I went home...
Also, you can call what the A8 and A16 do a "render" if for whatever reason you take offense to "algorithm", but it's still producing a virtualization through an algorithm. The A8 actually had a lot more control over how you could manipulate your rooms as well with its reverb/delay/decay/distance and tone settings. The A16 is just a new iteration of what the A8 was already doing, yet with many of the "knobs" removed for whatever reason. They even call it the "SVS algorithm".
Don't get me wrong, I think it's an amazing piece of hardware, but I never have an experience where the headphones simply melt away and I forget that I am wearing them.
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