The poll results are interesting. When I posted this poll questio on this forum, I thought 80%+ or so respondents would say "Yes it makes a difference."
"Sound Quality" is actually a misnomer in the poll question.
I really wanted to get at: "In your opinion, does reversing the the L-R have a negative impact on your overall sound experience."
And please note: I'm not talking about the headphones physically fitting correctly. For my query, I tried to make clear - assume your headphones will physically fit perfectly either way. To make it clearer: If you were able to unplug the cables and swap L-R, do you think it would have a negative impact on your auditory experience (of music!). Yes, its easy to see movies and video games would be negatively effected.
Most music has been recorded stereophonic. Because of this it doesn't really matter if you switch left and right. If you are talking about binaural tracks it does matter obviously. Same goes for OpenAL.
Originally Posted by EnOYiN /img/forum/go_quote.gif The future is now. It's called Ultrasone and it has S-Logic. And I don't know for how long binaural tracks have been around but it sure has been for a long time. We even got a thread for it in the music forums.
Originally Posted by b0dhi /img/forum/go_quote.gif It was surpsingly difficult to find a reference for it, even though its fairly common knowledge, but here is one article: Dolby Headphone Overview
Quote:
The best way to realize what we mean is to take your Dolby Headphone program and listen to it with your headphones on backwards. Wear them reversed, with the right side earcup/mini-speaker on your left ear and vice versa. With the headphones on backwards, where do you now hear the sounds that originally came from the front? Sure, right-to-left imaging is reversed as can be expected, but forget that for a moment. Try closing your eyes or turning off your TV. What you may notice is that the front-to-back imaging is not so clearly placed anymore. That is, you're probably not as sure whether the sound is coming from in front of you or from behind you.
You omitted the most significant sentence in the article you quote, which is the one that explains WHY front-to-back imaging suffers:
Quote:
When we're facing the TV screen and our eyes are open, our brains help our ears interpret where sounds should be coming from. Without the visual cues, Dolby Headphone loses some of its ability to image front-to-back.
It is not the fact that the headphones are reversed that causes difficulty with front-to-back imaging, but the fact that you have removed the visual cues that your brain is using along with the audio cues to create the three-dimensional image. I suspect that the reason that they tell you reverse the headphones is to dissociate the L-R stereo image from the memory of what you were watching before you closed your eyes.
In short, there is nothing about that page that supports your assertion that reversing the L and R channels affects from to back imaging.
If it were the cables that were switched, then no there wouldn't be a difference (just the stereo image would be mirrored). But some headphones are just uncomfortable if you switch the cups around
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