[Steril]

Well, I'm planning to buy a new MD player, and I saw that Sharp one with the Dolby Headphone processor (forgot the ref number).

Now, I'm wondering, is that processor of any interest on a MD player?? I suppose that technology can be very interesting on a DVD player for exemple (to view movies with special effects and so on). But is there any interest to use a Dolbu processor on regular music?

 

[rickcr42]

Just my opinion but for me at least,most of the "spatializers" sound artificial when used for music listening .I do run a passive surround system at times on the big rig when listening to music but mainly it is with live recordings which to my ears benefit from the additional rear channels.
When it comes to Dolby Headphones or Headphone surround,it is better suited to movie viewing where both the visual and audio cues combine.It "sounds " the way it "looks".
A car goes from left to right,the soundfield tracks from the left transducer -through the center as a mono mix signal-and then on to the right transducer.Other than special effects it has no real use when trying to recreate a realistic sound experience,except as I said with live recordings which already have a natural L-R out of phase signal in the recording.But hey,your choice dude.

 

[MacDEF]

Rick, that's what I thought, too, but I've been told that Dolby Headphone is actually different, and is aimed at music reproduction rather than "surround sound" effects. It is supposedly designed to improve space and soundstage.

That said, I've never heard it, so I have no clue what it *really* does

 

[rickcr42]

I heard an awsome demo of Dolby headphones at HE 01 but it was a pre-recorded DVD played back on a laptop .The Demo was for the soon (???????????) to be released Grado Theater phones,the Big Muffs i like to call them.Other than that I have only tried the limited versions for Real Jukebox and the "other" (drawing a blank) jukebox.Not enough to really form a valid opinion I guess.Who knows,maybe they got it right,but every other spatializer tried fell way short of the promise.

 

[wilbur]

There appear to be two flavors of dolby headphone, the one for movies working on a multi-channel dolby encoded signal, and the one for music working on a plain stereo signal. The latter could be considered a kind of very sophisticated crossfeed, and I find it pretty impressive. I'm seriously considering to reencode a large part of my cd collection in dolby headphone, making me independent of expensive hardware solutions, once I found a better way of doing so (those few jukebox programs which support DH are painful to use, as are the operating systems they are running on).

 

[skippy]

that dolby headphone demo at the HE show was amazing. i thought john said that the new line was going to be available in september. but i guess the events that have occured might have delayed it.