Hello, does anybody have any recommendations for binaurally recorded albums that actually sound binaural? I've been listening to some of Chesky Record's "Binaural+" albums and I've been disappointed because they didn't sound like this. Thank you.
Do you want to listen to binaural recorded music of highest audiophile quality or do you want to listen to recording gimmicks? The Chesky Binaural demo disc also has a barber example and other gimicks, also someone whispering directly into your ear as a show off of the technology's realism. Musicians are recorded while playing in a real room not while moving around the recording device. What do you think the Chesky recordings are missing? Take a listen to these on a HD800
I wouldn't want to spend any money on their "Binaural+" albums if they were just plain, old-fashioned stereo albums because I don't like the music itself, not just the lackluster "binaural" recording of it. The non-music tracks by Chesky Records sound plenty binaural on my 840's, it seems to me that maybe binaural heads don't work well when you are recording music. However, I would love to be proven wrong.
Tastes may differ but as far as realism is concerned, this album impressed me most out of what I've heard. As a side note. A LOT of difference makes the audio equipment you try to reproduce this music on and the resolution of the tracks. If it's like standard CD 16/44 resolution you may just delete them from your PC without listening) If the portable audio setup is anything less than $1000-1500 which I consider a bare minimum for good quality components which must consist of a separate DAC/DAP, an amplifier, quality headphones (and I'm not talking about some mediocre ATH-50x or alike) and good cables you are most certainly not going to enjoy anything binaural to the highest level. (sigh*) I'm too demanding to music reproduction lately.
Having hi-res hardly matters for the binaural experience; all you need to be done can be done in Redbook. One difficulty comes in having a decent enough match between the end product of recording and playback chain and the localization cues that your brain actually expects. There's a great variance in HRTFs alone (and thus their match with a given dummy head), and interactions between the headphone and the listeners ears adds another possible source of error. Funnily enough I was just looking at some frequency-response averages from one HRTF database. Here's the FR spread for an impulse response to the left ear from a speaker at 45deg: Personally I haven't found the Chesky demo stuff convincing at all on my current setup, though the samples of actual music sound good, but nothing that would make me throw away my normal stereo albums.
@matt8268: The first song actually SOUNDED binaural, but not to the point that I was saying wow. Also, I didn't really like the song itself. Thank you for showing me that there IS music that sounds binaural though. At this point in time, I have not listened to your other two suggestions.
my favorite binaural track is the first track on the Ultrasone demo, Sileypud. That one sounds binaural and is a good recording. I agree most binaural music doesn't "sound" too binaural. Now that I have really good soundstage headphones, I'm finding non-binaural recordings just as satisfying, i'm impressed how out of my head "normal" recordings can now sound. where binaural really gives me that "holy smokes" feeling is with non-music. People whispering in ears and moving around your head. Music doesn't really move around, and it's the movement that creates the wow factor IMO.
I actually think that binaurally recorded music would sound amazing if the musicians didn't play to the sides of the binaural microphone head. That makes the recording sound like plain, old-fashioned stereo. If there was at least one musician performing in front of the microphone head (maybe a singer or something), I think that binaural music would sound a lot cooler.
Movement helps because it causes changes in time differences and intensity differences between the ears, and it causes the wavefront to interact with slightly different parts of the outer ear (of the dummy head, in this case). In a system where head-tracking isn't implemented, the only movement possible is in the source, hence your observation that recordings with movement going on can sound more convincing.
??? What are you talking about? Where do you think the singers like Amber Rubarth or Alexis Cole (both on Chesky binaural) were located in relation to the dummy head during the recording? Where does it sound like to you - split to the left and to the right? Is something messed up with you set up, don't you perceive anything centered in front of you when you listen to your headphones?
I don't think you understand what a binaural recording is supposed to sound like. Binaural recordings won't sound LIKE REALITY no matter what kind of headphones you use, and that's what you expect it seems. With binaural recordings you just eliminate some of the problems that stereo recordings have when playing on headphones, you don't create the perfect soundstage. You can't expect speaker-like soundstage and imagining, that will never ever happen with headphones, at least not with some seriously advanced DSP's perfectly matched to your headphones and your ears. Neurophysiology of hearing is far more complex than most people give it credit, and it's extremely difficult to fool your brain into thinking you're not listening to headphones but at something far away from you coming from a certain direction.
