Tried this with he-500 headphones in Dying Light, I heard a surround effect but dynamics were too flat and visualising of sounds in games were all too distant. I found it difficult to grasp if I was standing next to an enemy or if it was 100 metres away. Would be a great effect to add ambience to a game but on its own it falls short on replicating how things sound in real life.
Sticking to Cmss-3d.
Hi
@fluidz
Thanks for trying Out Of Your Head and posting your impressions.
Just curious which speaker presets you were using?
I agree that some of the speaker presets intended for listening to music are generally in fairly reverberant rooms.
For those people looking for a sound with less reverberant rooms, the recording studio or home theater preset environments would work best since they tend to have more acoustically treated, better damped rooms.
Secondly, with regards to "realism", there's a subtle distinction about what's possible with Out Of Your Head. We do not claim that Out Of Your Head will recreate real-life sound in a virtual world. Out Of Your Head is meant to replicate the sound of a real room with real speakers. So you should hear the sound, in a game for example, as if you were playing that game while sitting in a home theater or recording studio with 8 speakers in the room. If you were to do that, you would hear the "sound" of the room you are sitting in and the distance of the speakers from your location. Therefore, a sound source cannot sound like it's coming from any closer that the nearest speaker is from you listening position. Does playing a game in a 7.1 home theater system sound like "real-life"? I guess it could but it depends on the game too. But I can assure you that the sound you hear in Out Of Your Head is the same sound you would hear if you were in a room with 7.1 speakers.
However, with Out Of Your Head, people often expect a 3D audio only experience where the sounds are not coming from speakers, but generated and positioned in 3D space with no room interactions or wall reflections, etc. Unfortunately, that is not what Out Of Your Head is doing. Out Of Your Head is replicating the sound as if you were sitting in a real room with real speakers. I think very few people have done any gaming on a real 7.1 speaker system, or if they have, don't expect the sound to be completely 3D, but understand that the sound is coming from 8 speakers in the room and expect to hear room reflections and the sound coming from several feet away from the speakers.
But when you're wearing headphones, people expect the sound to come from anywhere.
There are technologies that use computer algorithms to position audio sources in 3D space, with some success. But we felt that the compromise in the overall sound quality was too great. We designed our software for audiophiles and audio enthusiasts who wanted high quality audio first and foremost. That's why we felt accurately replicating the sound of real rooms with real speakers through measurement was the best way to preserve the high end sound of great speakers.
I hope this explains a little about what we do and maybe helps people understand why they hear what they hear when listening to Out Of Your Head.