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Originally Posted by edstrelow
I agree with Headphoner. I had a pre-amp with a blend circuit, which mixed the left and right signals and found it was of no help whatsoever. Subsequently I bought a set of Polk SDA speakers, which attempt to suppress the crossfeed and realized this was where speaker reproduction should be heading. Within their sweet spot you get a very vivid sense of localization. The sound sources kind of jump out at you. In addtion localization can extend to the side beyond the location of the speakers. When you move away from the sweet spot, the image is just like regular speakers.
This convinced me that crossfeed is bad for speaker reproduction and attempting to put it in headphones is just bizarre.
The Headroom crowd do a major disservice trying to peddle this form of auditory distortion as an improvement in fidelity beause it is more "speaker-like." All they are doing is imitating the fundamental weakness of stereo speakers, the creation of an artificial blending of signals which have no correspondance in the real world.
The crossfeed signals are also referred to as "phantom channels." Essentially 2 speakers create 4 signals, the left speaker feeding the right ear and the right speaker feeding the left ear are the two"phantoms"
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If one wanted to insert acoustic crosstalk into headphone listening, crosstalk like that with regular stereo speakers, one would have to do more than blend the left and right channels. The left channel feed into the right channel would have to be delayed a bit (because, with speakers, the right ear hears the left channel a bit later than the left ear hears the left channel) and frequency shaped. The frequency shaping would follow what is called a Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF), which maps the absorption of various frequencies as sound travels around the head from the left speaker to the right ear.
The same would have to be done for the right channel feed into the left channel. HeadRoom says that their circuit is supposed to insert speaker-like crosstalk into headphone listening. I am not familiar with the details of the HeadRoom circuit. So I don't know whether HeadRoom's circuit tries to do all of the above. But inserting speaker-like acoustic crosstalk into headphone listening is, in my opinion, a mistake. And you agree! --Best, Les
