Has anyone have any suggestions for improving the audio experience
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For context
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It particularly matters with binaural recordings, since part of the illusion depends on the HRTF used in the recording (a physical head in some cases) matching your own.
I spoke to a sound engineer who said he’d never found binaural audio convincing - but was doing some research that allowed him to measure his personal HRTF. Substituting that made the effect work for him.
I think it’s less important if you’re listening on speakers - where your head and ears should be doing their thing the same way they would when listening live.
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This applies to speakers also, although it’s harder. You can simulate sound coming from any direction, not only from a line connecting the two speakers.
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Check the related thread Enhancing the Headphone Experience - Applied Psychoacoustics and Binaural surround sound - #6 by Gimlet. Alongside the commercial opportunities offered by headphone implementations of Dolby Atmos and Auro 3D, this subject is now getting a lot of academic focus at European universities.
The University of Huddersfield (UK) is now marketing a software HRTF-based binaural implementation (Virtuoso, which works with Roon) and the University of Antwerp is offering personalised HRTF measurements as well as head trackers. To my mind, this is fantastic progress, as it means that formerly esoteric hi-fi and theoretical discussions are now becoming mainstream, and relatively affordable and high quality binaural software and hardware products are more likely to come to the market in the near future. Of course, the Smyth Realiser is already in the market, but this hardly qualifies as “affordable”.
I assume this is the approach taken with some of the recent soundbars and Dolby Atmos? I haven’t yet heard any that are particularly effective but this seems to be one of the more technically interesting and rapidly evolving areas in hi-fi - as with earlier iterations of home cinema technologies.
Yes. In a soundbar, you can have more than two speakers, which is an advantage, but the principles are similar. You can do other things with multi-speakers, i.e. directional sound: you sit in front, you hear the sound; you get off-axis, you can’t hear anything.
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