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Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 8:01 am

It is progressing more slowly than I thought but this recent announcement may speed up the process of personally creating an appropriate Head Related Transfer Function to allow headphones to create a realistic acoustic space. HRTF is a term used to describe how your head shape, the pinnae of your ears, your shoulders, etc allow your brain to determine positions of sounds by creating comb filtering. All those physical characteristics of your body are bypassed when using headphones contributing to the "sound in the middle of your head" syndrome. HRTF processing allows modifications of the acoustic signal to emulate your missing HRTF when using headphones. Years ago Sony had a headset controller with a rudimentary fixed HRTF correction but it had limited capability because it was not tailored to the individual. This will be interesting to follow.

https://audioxpress.com/news/psb-speake ... g-profiles

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 9:23 am

Sennheiser made an inline processor with multiple HRTF's to work with headphones called Lucas. The user selected the HRTF that matched their hearing the best. Will be interesting to see if this can be closer with adjustment to the users hearing.

https://www.ebay.com/i/263426578476?chn ... 8e97bd03a0

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 11:02 am

tomp wrote:It is progressing more slowly than I thought but this recent announcement may speed up the process of personally creating an appropriate Head Related Transfer Function to allow headphones to create a realistic acoustic space. HRTF is a term used to describe how your head shape, the pinnae of your ears, your shoulders, etc allow your brain to determine positions of sounds by creating comb filtering. All those physical characteristics of your body are bypassed when using headphones contributing to the "sound in the middle of your head" syndrome. HRTF processing allows modifications of the acoustic signal to emulate your missing HRTF when using headphones. Years ago Sony had a headset controller with a rudimentary fixed HRTF correction but it had limited capability because it was not tailored to the individual. This will be interesting to follow.

https://audioxpress.com/news/psb-speake ... g-profiles

No amount of digital manipulation can truly match a binaural recording. And they are extremely rare as the demand is not there. I haven't had the need or desire to listen through head phones ever since I bought my first house.

However, I can imagine that a good binaural recording through state-of-art playback equipment and some really nice electrostatic headphones would be nothing short of awesome.

A quick survey of eBay offerings shows that there are a few binaural recordings on offer -- the quality of which has to be determined by the end user.

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 11:26 am

A significant amount of the human response to sound occurs in parts of the body that headphones don't stimulate... I'll pass.

Roscoe

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 11:43 am

I just thought to point out (out of the context of headphones) that when "dialing in your system" and wish to understand the room that it is in you can plug up one ear and listen.

By eliminating the brain's ability to process sound when it comes to phase and timing that gives up the ability to locate sound sources, you can actually "hear the room."

With one ear blocked your focus is on the ambient condition and not the first arrival. It's like you have a virtual omni-directional microphone in your head.

Walking around the room in this way can reveal issues that you may have had a difficult time pin-pointing. Yo may also discover that your room is better than you may have thought.

This "gimmick" for lack of a better word -- helped me when recording live events in terms of microphone placement.

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 5:27 pm

Forget this headphone nonsense. Elon Musk wants to stream music directly to your brain.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/elon ... um=editors

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 6:34 pm

Cogito wrote:Forget this headphone nonsense. Elon Musk wants to stream music directly to your brain.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/elon ... um=editors

That's not so far fetched. A buddy of mine got the patent on technology converting brain-waves into music for psycho-anaysis.

Who's to say we can't reverse the process for entertainment?

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 8:07 pm

SoundMods wrote:
tomp wrote:It is progressing more slowly than I thought but this recent announcement may speed up the process of personally creating an appropriate Head Related Transfer Function to allow headphones to create a realistic acoustic space. HRTF is a term used to describe how your head shape, the pinnae of your ears, your shoulders, etc allow your brain to determine positions of sounds by creating comb filtering. All those physical characteristics of your body are bypassed when using headphones contributing to the "sound in the middle of your head" syndrome. HRTF processing allows modifications of the acoustic signal to emulate your missing HRTF when using headphones. Years ago Sony had a headset controller with a rudimentary fixed HRTF correction but it had limited capability because it was not tailored to the individual. This will be interesting to follow.

https://audioxpress.com/news/psb-speake ... g-profiles

No amount of digital manipulation can truly match a binaural recording. And they are extremely rare as the demand is not there. I haven't had the need or desire to listen through head phones ever since I bought my first house.

However, I can imagine that a good binaural recording through state-of-art playback equipment and some really nice electrostatic headphones would be nothing short of awesome.

A quick survey of eBay offerings shows that there are a few binaural recordings on offer -- the quality of which has to be determined by the end user.



Binaural recordings cannot duplicate the HRTF functions of each individual listener. During your whole life your brain is learning to translate the comb filtering caused by each of your body parts to determine positioning and space. The construction of the headphones does not restore that function.

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 24th, 2020, 9:29 pm

Maybe our hearing isn't changing that much over time but our bellies are getting bigger changing the comb filtering.

Re: Interesting advance in HRTF

July 25th, 2020, 7:54 am

As I went bald I noticed the comb filtering changed a lot. ;)
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