[dhwilkin]

Yeah yeah yeah, but what are your opinions about DH, jude?

 

[jude]

Quote:

Originally posted by dhwilkin Yeah yeah yeah, but what are your opinions about DH, jude?

(takes sip of water and deep breath)

And furthermore....

 

[Cousin Eddie]

Jude, what headphones have you used with Dolby headphone? For music to sound good with DH, you really need to use headphones that have a true flat frequency response - headphones that would be good for binaural recordings. Until recently, my main headphones were Sony CD350's. They are very bright. DH with these headphones sounded much, much better than listening without DH. I recently got the HD580's. With the HD580's, I now never turn on DH. Using DH with the HD580's sounds much too dark.

Have you tried the movie version of DH? I think it might be a little better than the stereo version. DH with bright headphones is very musical. When I watch DVD's on my computer, I really look forward to the music in the movies. It sounds really, really good. I look forward to the end credits coming because the music sounds so good.

Also, how are you getting sound out of the computer? I have the Sound Blaster Live Platinum, which comes with the Live Drive digital I/0 card. The headphone amp on the Live Drive sounds infinitely better than the sound out of the sound card. The sound out of the sound card sounds very murky in comparison and I can't stand to listen to it compared to the Live Drive. And this is despite the fact that the sound card is the good version - it's not a cheap piece of junk, it has the gold connectors and everything.

I recently got the Etymotics. Even somewhat high bitrate mp3's sound bad with the Etymotics, but DH still sound great. I assure you that DH is not just some cheap effect like SRS WOW or something. It's very musical and realistic with the right equipment.

 

[jude]

Quote:

Originally posted by Cousin Eddie Jude, what headphones have you used with Dolby headphone? For music to sound good with DH, you really need to use headphones that have a true flat frequency response - headphones that would be good for binaural recordings.

I've used Sennheiser HD-600's, Sony MDR-V6's, and my new Koss KSC-50's very recently. In the past (when I first found out about Dolby Headphone), I tried it with cheapie came-with-it type headphones and Grado SR-80's. I wasn't fond of the effects with any of these phones. Again, I'm not trying to say that I expect anyone else's opinions to parallel mine, only that Dolby Headphone hasn't been my cup of tea.

Quote:

Originally posted by Cousin Eddie I assure you that DH is not just some cheap effect like SRS WOW or something. It's very musical and realistic with the right equipment.

Again, I don't find that Dolby Headphone is as bad or "cheap" as WOW, but I do not find Dolby Headphone musical or realistic.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The only implementations of Dolby Headphone I've tried were plug-ins for computer-based MP3 playback software. Maybe as a hardware solution (as part of a headphone amp, for example) I'd find otherwise? I don't know.

 

[Cousin Eddie]

Jude, so what was your source out of the computer for DH? The source is actually the most important part. Coming right out of my sound card, there is not enough detail and all the positional effects and wall reverbations are lost and it all just sounds like noise.

The main problems I have with DH are simply the problems that relate to the real world that DH models. With DH you've got the phantom channels problem as well as interference from the room walls that you would have in real life. The problems are actually just tradeoffs. Now that I've got the ER-4S's and HD580's, I like the pure signal (no crossfeed or DH) the best, although this partly is just the purist in me speaking. DH sure sounds great and musical with the CD350's...

 

[Number9]

Jude,

I would suggest you retry DH with:

1. Good headphones
2. A decent sound card
3. A good source - like a good CD - not MP3's.

I think your views would change tout-de-suite.

I find that the better the material, the more I get out of DH. With MP3, you get this weird "halo/echo" effect added sometimes - which is probably what you don't like.

Believe me, with a good CD source, good cans, DH sounds good.

Both Realplayer and Musicmatch Jukeboxes enable you to play CD's using DH.

 

[AndreYew]

I agree with Jude --- Dolby Headphone sounds bad to me. I was using MusicMatch playing back CDs. Headphone system consists of HD-600s driven by a HeadRoom Supreme.

To my ears, DH does a very good impression of making me think I'm listening in a giant cardboard box. I agree with Jude that it sounds very processed. The artifacts did not sound like analog artifacts you'd get from a bad soundcard or headphones, but sounded like everything was overprocessed and mechanical. Sorry I can't be more explicit, but that's how it sounded to me.

--Andre

 

[Cousin Eddie]

AndrewYew, the HD600's are similar to the HD580's and are too dark to use with DH. With the HD580's, DH kind of sounds like a cardboard box to me too.

 

[thomas]

Some people don't like any changes to the audio, and want to listen to the music EXACTLY as it was recorded. So for them, ANY changes, such as x-feed, virtualizers, and equalizers are totally unacceptable, as they change the sound, for better or worse.

I think DH is the ONLY virtualizer i've tried that has a positive effect overall, it makes the sound "out of the head", while adding much less distortion than others. Still, the sound is changed drastically, and for purists, that is unacceptable.

So we all have different tastes, it really doesn't have much to do with equipment quality. (and jude probably has one of the best headphone setups anyways).

And if anything, the Sennheiser HD-580/600 are probably the most accurate dynamic headphones, adding very little colouration, so if anything, the HTRFs and processing should come through the best on those headphones. If you used headphones that added a lot of colouration, the effect would be totally destroyed, even if the headphones sound great with normal music.

I have been the biggest supporter of dolby headphone in these boards (next to the pres of Lake technologies

), and was actually the first person to try it and write a detailed review. I certainly think this technology is very promising, and IMO can already improve the overall sound, but it still has a long way to go before it can achive out-of-head virtualization while staying transparent...

 

[Cousin Eddie]

Quote:

So we all have different tastes, it really doesn't have much to do with equipment quality. (and jude probably has one of the best headphone setups anyways).

It certainly does have something to do with equipment quality. Listening out of my sound card vs the digital I/0 card gives completely different results. But the key thing to understand is that it's not JUST about quality. You need a setup that is equalized for binaural recordings as opposed to regular speaker recordings to make DH sound musical. It doesn't matter if Jude has the best setup in the world for regular recordings, you need a different setup for DH. Headphones that sound bad without DH (CD350's) can sound good with DH, and headphones that sound good without DH (HD580's) will sound bad with DH.

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

You need a setup that is equalized for binaural recordings as opposed to regular speaker recordings to make DH sound musical.

But I have heard many binaural enthusiasts say that the HD600s are stellar for binaural recordings...

 

[Cousin Eddie]

MacDEF,

The HD580/600's are certainly not optimized for binaural recordings. They have a very laid back presentation that is meant to simulate the sound that reaches your ears from speakers. I have listened to binaural recordings with my HD580's and they sound good, but they sound more distant than they should. My CD350's work much better for binaural recordings.

Binaural recording is different from DH in at least 3 ways that contribute to binaural recordings sounding better than DH with headphones equalized for speakers.

1. phantom channels. Speakers have the phantom channel problem but binaural doesn't.

2. distance from dummy head in binaural recordings. In most of the binaural recordings I've downloaded from binaural.com, the sound source is closer than the virtual DH speakers to the dummy head. Therefore, the high-frequency roll-off in these recordings is less than from the virtual DH speakers.

3. wall reverberations. In DH, the reverberations off the walls that make the music sound good in muscially designed rooms - played back at lower frequencies than they should be - combine with the low frequencies in the recording to form a concealing cloud of bass. You can't really hear the details of the music. The singer sounds lost in a fog.

 

[thomas]

I find an easier explanation to your observations-

The Sennheiser 580's are extremely accurate and revealing, so all the distortion introduced by the process is played back, distracting from the overall sound

Your cheaper sony's normally do not sound good because they add colouration and distortion to the audio. But with DH, this distortion helps mask the distortion of the DH processing, so you can hear the main effects of the processing but not the distortion. As a result, the overall sound is better.

 

[Nikolai Dot Org]

Don't forget to try Jan Meier's recommended headphone positioning... down and slightly in front of the ear. I just tried it. Big difference!

 

[Cousin Eddie]

Thomas,

There's no question that the HD580's/HD600's are not equalized for binaural. That point is not in question. They are clearly equalized for music recorded for speaker playback. They are probably some of the worst (besides some closed bass-heavy designs) high-end headphones for binaural recordings.

The Etymotics are much, much more detailed than the HD580's, and, as I said, DH sounds good with the Etymotics. The ER-4S, which is equalized for speaker recordings but is less laid back than the HD580/600's, sounds good with DH. The ER-4B has almost a perfectly flat response, and is intended for binaural recordings. Anyway, the CD350's are not very much less detailed than the HD580's, so that wouldn't be the problem.

If you still think that having less detail helps DH, try listening on some cheap $30 headphones. It sounds very, very bad. Having more detail definitely helps DH and allows you to appreciate DH even with the ER-4S which has a slightly dark (yet not as dark as the HD580's) presentation with binaural/DH.