wax&wires

My dad just sent this over to me from wired.com.

My senior project in college was to develop a binaural audio plug-in that would simulate surround sound through standard ear-bud stereo headphones (see: wavearts panorama to get the idea). The plug-in would use HRTFs to trick the brain into thinking that it was hearing sounds from all around the user’s head, even though they were all coming through two simple headphone speakers in the user’s ears. I thought the applications for such technology would be endless, from mobile gaming and movie watching to new frontiers is pop music (remember Pearl Jam’s Binaural). It turned out to be quite an endeavor, and we have yet to see binaural technology hit the main stream in the way that a lot of us anticipated.

At CES 2009, Psyko Audio Labs offered their contribution to mobile surround sound with a 5.1 channel surround sound gaming headset. Their’s does not use binaural tech, from what I understand, but actually places a 5.1 system into a pair of semi-open headphones. Rather than using HRTF processing to create delays between the two ears, Psyko actually places the speakers on top of the listener’s head, and then funnels the sound through small air tubes to create the correct pinna effect with tiny delays between the ears, small volume differences between the two ears, and frequency modifications generated by the outer ear. That’s the same thing done with binaural headphones, only Psyko is modeling it with a physical system rather than digitally with software. I might be reading into it, but I think the Psyko Audio Labs sales guy takes a dig at the binaural surround method when he talks about how “There’s no filtration, there’s no lag, there’s no latency.” with the Psyko Set. You can read more about the way they do it here.

I’d be very interested in checking a set of these out once they come out later this year.

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