Crossfeed and Head Tracking

Sorry to be off topic, but I have a Realiser and the head tracking is OK initially, but ultimately I find it to be more trouble than it's worth. When you are listening or watching a movie, you don't really move your head very much, if at all. Also you need to make sure the head tracker is mounted properly on your headphones and charged up. If you talk to a lot of Realiser owners, a good percentage of them do not use the head tracker.

I thought about incorporating head tracking in my Out Of Your Head software, but the expense of getting into manufacturing and selling hardware was not worth the limited benefits of head tracking. I also didn't think people would want to pay the extra money for head tracking.

Most people find the virtual speaker experience with Out Of Your Head works pretty well without head tracking once your brain gets used to the sound of speakers through your headphones.
-Darin

 

I don't want to get this thread off topic. We should start another thread to discuss. I am not sure as a MOT if I can even be discussing my own product or the competition.

 

With points that have the same timing and level differences, either on the cone of confusion or directly in front of the head, the FR at the eardrum is different as the angle to head differs. The pinna is shaped with multiple anti-resonances dependent on direction, as well as frequency differences from the torso and such. It's still kind of ambiguous, but I can hear directly front, top, and back differently without head movement.

Jens Blauert showed way back when that you can manipulate the perceived source direction on the median plane by boosting the frequency response in selected frequency bands. So it seems natural from the previous that a correct FR is also needed for proper spatiality.

 

Let me explain further...

Head tracking works, no doubt about it. It is especially helpful for the new listener. When someone first hears audio processing like the Realiser or Out Of Your Head, it can be tricky for the brain to "believe" what it is hearing. Your ears and brain are hearing audio coming from a sound source three or more feet away from you, but visually, your brain sees that there is no sound source at that location, so it gets confusing. But as with Ultrabike and others, when you move your head slightly and the sound source location stays in the same spot, then that helps your brain "believe" that the sound is in fact coming from somewhere well away from your listening position.

However, I have found that a visual cue is far more effective than head tracking for making the localization of the sound source work. If you see a pair of speakers, for example, it is easy for your brain to believe that the sound is coming from that speaker even if the speaker is not connected to anything. I often have people who demo Out Of Your Head place speakers or even a cardboard box in front of them to help their brain "learn" to interpret what they are hearing.

Another effective trick that I use all the time is to disable all the virtual speakers and listen to one speaker at a time. With one single sound source, it's much easier for the brain to figure out where the sound is coming from compared to listening to two or more speakers at a time.

But once your brain gets used to the "out of your head" effect, it's very easy to hear the exact location of the virtual speakers without head tracking, visual cues, or any of the "tricks'. That's why Realiser owners often don't bother with the head tracker since it's no longer needed to solidify the virtual speaker locations.

Not sure if you've ever listened/watched our demo, but at the end of the demo video is a track which plays each of the 8 speakers one at a time. For most people, the location of the speakers works even without a head tracker. Just put on your headphones and go to this page:
http://fongaudio.com/demo

Alternately you can download the Out Of Your Head trial from our website and try it for yourself to see if it works for you without a head tracker. If you do try it, listen to a two channel song and then mute the left speaker so you just hear the right speaker and vice versa to help your brain hear the location of the speakers. You should be able to hear exactly where the speakers are located in the room that we measured. Each room you try will have different speaker locations.

The front center channel is certainly the trickiest to get right for the reasons stated above by Ultrabike and briskly. And it doesn't work for everyone, but it's definitely possible to get right especially if I do a custom measurement using your ears and head, etc.