Design of bionic ears is an important problem in the measurement of high quality HRIR for rendering binaural audio in virtual and augmented reality applications. In this paper the design and development of silicone based low cost binaural ears on a Styrofoam based mannequin is discussed. Subsequently a new sampling scheme which results in a reduced condition number of the spherical harmonics matrix is proposed. Significant improvements in median plane perception are noted when binaural audio is rendered using the measured HRIR and an overlap and save method of synthesis. Subjective evaluations on multi source localization with rendered binaural audio indicate acceptable Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for use in practical applications.