[Erik Garci]

  it would be better to just have a tracking band you can put on any headphone.

The RondoMotion lets you do that.
 
http://dysonics.com/rondomotion/

 

[Richter Di]

The RondoMotion lets you do that.

http://dysonics.com/rondomotion/

Also the http://www.3dsoundlabs.com/produit/3d-sound-one-module/ does offer this. Unfortunatey not well implemented.

 

[Richter Di]

Basically, 3D headphones should aim more at games and movies more than they do at music.

Not necessarily. The Smyth Realizer A16 is in my opinion also something for music lovers.

 

[allalone0]

Not necessarily. The Smyth Realizer A16 is in my opinion also something for music lovers.

You are right on that one. But I guess realizer isn't just a simple pair of headphones, is it?

 

[RRod]

Oh no. The German computer magazine "Heise" did a short test on the CES.
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Viel-Laerm-um-nichts-3D-Kopfhoerer-Ossic-X-ausprobiert-3589796.html

Headline: Much noise around nothing.

Summary:
With VR glasses it works, but the Heise team thinks this is standard as the Occulus Rift already is providing the audio 3D work.
Once you use the Ossic headphones with music and you use the 3D Audio spacialization there's a loss of sound quality and music sounds dull. Heise found it sounded better in stereo.
Hardware looks good according to the article. Headphone fits vgood on the head and have good sound without 3D active.

 
With only 2 tranducers and not having any measurements on your head/ears, all the Oculus can be doing is using dummy-head/average-based HRTF calculations and applying those to the signal going out to normal headphones. To be worth the $$, Ossic needs to do better in terms of how well it personalizes to our own anatomy***. We shall see, but it's also worth noting that many people haven't taken a lot of time evaluating stereo vs. virtualized sound even in games. This is even more true in music, where most people haven't even tried something like a crossfeed plugin, let alone given it a fair evaluation against what might be years of unprocessed headphone listening. Once these come out people will have a real chance to run them through all 3 ringers pretty well (games, movies, music).
 

  Don´t buy Ossic buy a vr headset. Then you get super accurate tracking of the sound in your virtual games. It´s there the benefit is afterall. The idea to put the tracking on the headphones themselves is really backwards it would be better to just have a tracking band you can put on any headphone.

 
Aren't they supposed to defer to the head tracking of the headset if one is attached?
 
 
***The Realiser is pretty much guaranteed to beat the dummy because it takes actual in-ear measurements. Ossic doesn't, so it's on them to show some decent HRTF correlations using only an ear-distance measurement and multiple drivers.

 

[Richter Di]

New interview with Ossic CE Jason Riggs at the CES 2017
https://youtu.be/2E4a6YG66lM

 

[valleynomad]

New interview with Ossic CE Jason Riggs at the CES 2017
https://youtu.be/2E4a6YG66lM

Ossic X got 30 sensors? We will see

 

[SurvivorNVL]

Looks like they can add support for games and VR just through engine plug-ins, so any games with the updated engine could make use of it in tandem with the sensors.  That'd be pretty awesome.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBTWyycKHi8&feature=em-uploademail

I wonder how heavy they are with all this equipment in them, though?  Comfy as they may be - if they're 450g+ eeeeh... that may be a little much at least for my head.

 

[oqvist]

Is there any point for it in VR though? Isn´t it better to disable all sensors and let the games audio do it´s work without distortion? Is Ossics head tracking really more accurate and latency free then the Oculus?

 

[RRod]

  Is there any point for it in VR though? Isn´t it better to disable all sensors and let the games audio do it´s work without distortion? Is Ossics head tracking really more accurate and latency free then the Oculus?

 
There's a few major components going on here: ITD, ILD, spectral cues, and head tracking. The Ossic will already (supposedly) let the VR handle the head tracking, but it could still provide superior results for the 3 HRTF components.

 

[Sordel]

Summary: With VR glasses it works, but the Heise team thinks this is standard as the Oculus Rift already is providing the audio 3D work.

Couldn't care less about the Oculus Rift. From what I sense in terms of the media response to VR, PSVR is on the ropes and the best VR solution - the HTC Vive - is never going to reach critical mass in terms of supported software. To be honest even if VR was doing well, there'd be a question in my mind about whether users wanted more cables and weight on their heads, but it isn't, so that question is moot.

So if Ossic X depends at all, in any way, on VR it's already drawing dead.

 

[buke9]

They will be at CanJam SoCal in April so I'll get to hear it again we'll see what the production unit sounds like now and what kind of demonstration they put together for it now.

 

[Sujay Rao]

If 3D is their big USP, it's obviously going to be a Gamer's or Cinema/VR enthusiast's headphone. Speaking as an audiophile whose primary interest is music and not gaming or VR, I would be less interested in the wonders of the cinematic or gaming experience, and more keen to find out how it performs musically. If you plug it into the headphone socket of your DAP, will you think it's better than your Beyerdynamic, AKG or Sennheiser?

But I don't get 3D for audio.

When you're listening to a band or an orchestra, all of the music is coming from the front of you. A good system should be able to reproduce the illusion of musicians spread out at some distance in front of you. You can refer to devices like the Reveel (reviewed on Inner Fidelity) that does tricks with mixing and redistributing signals to each ear in order to create a kind of expanded musical effect. I bought one of these. As Tyll Hertensen says, the experience is difficult to define, but definitely interesting and somewhat attractive.

Nothing, except a 5.1 or 7.1 type system will generate the illusion of sound physically coming from all sides of the listener. This is NOT how you listen to music. I mean, what is there for 3D to do in a pure audio environment?

 

[chry5alis]

The speed of sound under normal conditions is around 770 mph.  Coming from either side of our head the sound will reach one ear fractions of a second before the other ear but it will still hit one ear first.  Our brains and ears have developed so much to be tuned into this time lapse that we use this phenomena constantly to pinpoint sound and its source in three dimensions.
 
For software to accurately mimic and manipulate this it already knows the speed of sound, and it can adjust the timing.  It only relies on one other constant - the distance (that is, between the left and right ear).  The problem has been that distance between our left and right ears varies from person to person so if the distance is off just slightly, your brain can get confused with an unfamiliar signal.
 
I am purely theorizing here, this is 100% guesswork, but perhaps with accurate (to which degree I do not know) HRTF data, and the relevant software, extremely subtle differences to the left and right channels of tracks could present a more holographic nature to our music.  Not just open or expansive, or wide and behind, but pinpoint and solid.  Immediately recognisable.  Added in with motion tracking and we have the basic premise for the ossic x.
 
Thats at least what I took from the first promo vid and what convinced me to go for the early bird kickstarter.  Time will tell if its all merely hokum or if there is any weight to support the theory. 
 
At least it will have a nice headband.

 

[buke9]

The headphones themselves didn't sounded too bad but not really seeing the need for these for music. I'm not going to sit and listen to music swinging my head around all the time having a different instrument or section upfront from the way it was mixed. It was a neat effect but to me that was all. From what I gather about VR the sound already follows the direction so I don't get it but that just might be me.