SVS is a revolutionary audio process that emulates, in headphones, the complete experience of listening to actual loudspeakers in an actual room, in up to eight-channel surround sound.

"The Realiser is a groundbreaking piece of equipment that must be heard. It’s like no other audio component out there, and it does everything Smyth Research says it does." Soundstage! Xperience - Sept 2011

"...an advancement that may completely change how we listen to music and watch video...." EnjoytheMusic.com - Jan 2011, Product of the Year

"Multichannel recordings were so compelling that I periodically had to remove the 'phones just to convince myself that they were the actual source of this wonderful illusion." Stereophile - Nov 2010

The Smyth Realiser provides a completely different experience from previous 'surround headphones' in which a multichannel (or stereo) recording sounds indistinguishably the same through headphones as it does through a loudspeaker array in a real room. The Realiser employs three critical components not seen in the other products: personalisation, head tracking, and the capture of the properties of any real listening space and sound system.

Personalisation

As mentioned above, surround virtualisers have used a generalised or average profile for ALL listeners. The Realiser provides a method of measuring and storing the individual profiles of each listener's unique ears, head, and torso. This measurement is easy, quick, and need be done only once. The difference between hearing one's own profile and the generalised one can be tremendous -- often larger than the difference between a typical virtualiser and plain stereo.

Head tracking

In the real world, the direction of a sound remains stationary as we move our heads -- in fact, we deliberately move our heads to discern the stationary direction more finely. With headphones, the sounds move with our heads. This is highly unnatural and a prime cue that we are listening to headphones, not the real world. For sound with picture, the fact that sounds move with the head while the screen remains fixed destroys the credibility of the experience and greatly weakens the association of picture and sound.

The Realiser system includes a small device atop the headphone headband and another small device at the front of the room, which together monitor the position of the listener's head every five milliseconds. As the head moves, and no matter how rapidly it moves, the Realiser recalculates all the factors, seamlessly and in real time, maintaining accurate localisation with respect to the screen and room. The importance of this to the perceived reality of the experience cannot be overstated. The sense of wearing headphones disappears.

The measurements

The Realiser package includes a pair of tiny microphones, inserted into earplugs, which are placed in the listener's ears for measurement. The listener sits at the listening position, within the array of speakers, typically 5.1 or 7.1, but any configuration including height channels can be accommodated. A brief set of test signals is played through the speakers, introduced by very simple spoken instructions. Then the listener puts on the headphones, and a second brief set of measurements is taken. The whole procedure takes less than five minutes.

In the measurement with the speakers, the Realiser captures not only the personal profile of the listener, but completely characterises the room, the speakers, and the electronics driving the speakers. In the measurement with the headphones, the system gathers data to correct for the interaction of the headphones and the ears, and the response of the headphone itself. The profile is stored in memory, and can also be written to a memory card for archiving and portability. With ample internal memory supplemented by memory cards, there is no limit to the number of listeners and environments whose characteristics can be captured.

Home users

The home user's first experience with the Realiser is typically the exact emulation of his own speaker system. But any audio system in any room can be measured, stored, and emulated at will. Audiophiles can emulate each others' rooms, speakers, and electronics. Audio High can make our top performance 2-channel and theater systems available for emulation. A home user, for example, can take the sound of his home theater into his bedroom for spectacular sound later at night and without disturbing others in the house.

Gamers

Today's computer and console games offer brilliantly realistic graphics that immerse the player in the action. Many games also generate surround sound, but many gamers either use very poor computer speakers, or modest headphones limited to stereo. With the Realiser, the sound of the game rises to the level of the graphics, hugely enriching the gaming experience.

Professional users

For professional users, the Realiser affords the ability for a mixing or mastering engineer to replicate a preferred monitoring environment in another location. The studio can be brought home, or taken on location. A variety of consumer playback systems and rooms can be called up for checking the suitability of a music mix for commercial release. A client can hear a mix in the environment where the engineer created it without travelling there. Within an organisation, a proven good monitoring environment can be replicated as many times as there are users who need the room, and the replicated studios can be used simultaneously at any number of workstations, greatly relieving demand on limited facilities and saving the cost of building additional rooms. Or different monitoring environments suited to different tasks can be accessed from the same physical workstation. Because headphones are used, the workstations themselves need not be isolated.