There's no such thing as headphone depth, or height.

It's amazing how we have a little supercomputer in our heads, with frequency response / phase maps, and inverse functions to translate tiny relative changes in orientation to where the sounds come from.

I should head up to the Bay Area to Audio High and write up a report on the Realizer.

 

Yup. I don't really know how things work inside our bodies that well. And to be honest, when I tried the Realizer @ one of the meets I was somewhat skeptical. Even if I know this or that about DSP I really had no prior experience with this.

I think I tried with some random phones they had there, and the rep even caution me that it may not work that well because the thing was not calibrated to my ears. I said to myself something on the order of "meh, lets do this shit anyway".

At first it didn't do it for me. Then I moved my head around a bit, and shit got real. It's a bit disorienting because all of the sudden sound was coming in front off me from a freaking wall (actually from beyond the wall, and there was empty space there). And obviously there is no way that can happen. Again, a bit disorienting at first.

 

I think we are talking about two different things. What I am referring to is localization of specific instruments on a stage created by two speakers. We can sense depth, boundaries, precise localization, etc. because we have both visual cues and head movements (either significant or not significant) to pre-establish and continuously establish a calibration. The brain fills in a lot of holes. There is no such process with headphones, and thus why headphones cannot provide a good sense of depth, stage boundaries, or precise localization... except when the below happens.

Freaky... while brain is learning.

 

SBAF loaner program?

 

No, no, I agree with this. That's how I see things as well. While I dunno exactly how the brain does it, it just does it. I think it's sort of a Kalman like filter with a shit load of inputs. Likely doing estimations to indeed fill out the gaps and stuff. But who knows. Whatever it does, it does it great.

Yup. It was awesome though.

It actually worked. I was able to pin point instruments, including depth! But the instruments weren't there! So the movement, even w/o the precise visual queues sort of work for me. At least with whatever they were playing at the time. I think we sort of have an Inertial Navigation Unit built in - My understanding is that some folks like me get dizzy easily due to this with certain rides. Lots of stuff going on.

Just put a 3-D movie in front and we would be styling.

 

The ultimate very frightening question (relates to consciousness and existence): who does the perceiving?

 

No kidding. Consciousness and existence is a complete mystery to me. I honestly get lost thinking about it. We change as time passes by. But I remain I.

More like: "I am, therefore I am". (YMMV)

 

Yes, those things happen because the there are two speakers trying to create the illusion of localized instruments on a stage. As you mentioned, it's not the real thing.

I'm saying freedom of head movement allows the brain to calibrate space so we can localize instruments on a defined soundstage.

Short of maybe a Smith or similar system with head tracking, I've never listened to headphones and sensed a defined stage with left and right borders located at wall or beyond a wall in front of me, or felt there was a sitar four feet to the right and one foot behind the tabla.

 

Some of the old game engines with A3D could do that. The very essence of being able to change orientation and hear the changes allowed me to understand if sounds were coming from the front (behind a wall) or from behind. This was with headphones too.

I was a huge Quake 3 WFA player. This mod was kind of like today's Overwatch back in the day.

 

Or sometimes there is no "I"... And then I snap back to the existence of an "I".

 

And an "I" that is fooled into thinking that it has been around for say 40 something years (through perception), but it just became "I" a few seconds ago.

The question remains about what constitutes "I" and why "I" even exists.

LOL! I'm a mere mortal. I know nuttin.

 

On my 11+ hours of flight between LAX to JFK can back again, I tried out one of Dr. Chesky's music binaural recording discs. Didn't do shit for me. There are some other binaural recordings that actually did a better job. (I can't remember which ones, but look up LFF's recommendations on HF from years ago). True soundstage, that is presentation of a soundstage 10 feet or 25 feet in front of me, beyond the walls of the room, with localized instruments only exists in the speaker world.

If you can get the speaker effect with headphones, that's great.

 

Generally speakers with as small a baffle as possible around the tweeter and mids will do precise imaging well. Wilson Puppy for example. Also need a good room with minimized first reflections from back and side walls.