frontal sounds go up instead of further in front of me with headphones. why?
May 22, 2016 at 5:24 PM Post #31 of 43
  With headphones, the shape of the ear is not put to good use either.  The sound comes from the side and is not far from getting straight in the ear canal. But even if the pinnae is imposing it's signature, it will be for sounds fired on the side, horizontally.  And I hear them like they're coming from the top...


I wonder if that is part of why Sony MDR 7510 works better than most to prevent center imaging from going straight to the top of my skull.  The drivers in the ear pieces are angled maybe some 20 degrees so sound comes more forward than is the norm with most phones. 
 
Jul 14, 2016 at 6:11 AM Post #33 of 43
ok so at long last I've spent real time testing this "seriously", like hanging small speakers in the air at different positions, filming myself and other silly ideas. my conclusion is so obvious it's painful
it has to do with me moving my head.
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I'm guessing the singer is strapped on my face because when I look around I still have the same sound in a headphone, so my brain understands that the voice can't come from a distance else the angle would change in an obvious way, and as I can't see anything in front of me, it has to be above. I must end up with an angle because I still get audio cues from things in front of me and my brain must negotiate some weird in between.
when I look at the band on a screen(had to look for passages where the cam wouldn't change every 3 secs
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), and try my best not to move my head. I do get something "logical" with the guy in front of me. but not moving my head is confusingly hard, I had never realized how much I do the "confused dog move", slightly tilting my head on one side when I concentrate on the sound.
here is me casually listening to my favorite test tone:

 
anyway even with the crappiest mono source into a tube with the the opening 5cm away from my head as an attempt to ruin the room effect, I get an imaging that makes more sense than with a headphone
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. I really need a cheap smyth realiser copycat. or to get rid of all direct neighbors and use speakers.
 
Jul 14, 2016 at 7:37 AM Post #34 of 43
No, it's fully linked to the shape of your ears, head and torso, imposing the sonic signature to what your ear.  Headphones remove this information and your brain is confused.  If you use HRTF, it helps, but it has to be your specific one.  A Smyth Realizer would be the best solution, but I'm now trying to measure my HRTF to at least project stereo sound forward instead of upward.
 
Moving the head is our natural trick to improve localization of sound.  When you see something that doesn't match what you hear, your reflex is to move your head to solve the issue.
 
Jul 29, 2016 at 3:20 AM Post #35 of 43
For those of you who are interested in real out of your head sound, the new Smyth Realiser A16 will go live on kickstarter on monday: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1959366850/1286431739?token=e7f27544.
 
It's only £750, which I think is a really good deal. I tried the A8, the predecessor to the A16, and it is an amazing experience, it truly sounds like listening to speakers 
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Jul 29, 2016 at 6:14 AM Post #36 of 43
  For those of you who are interested in real out of your head sound, the new Smyth Realiser A16 will go live on kickstarter on monday: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1959366850/1286431739?token=e7f27544.
 
It's only £750, which I think is a really good deal. I tried the A8, the predecessor to the A16, and it is an amazing experience, it truly sounds like listening to speakers 
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I really have to try this someday. the price is right this time IMO. I've been looking at the A8 for years and it was 3000€... with the new model the A8 is now "only" at 2600euro
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so new version for a good deal less, we're starting to talk business.
 
on a related matter, I've backed up the NX 3D thing already with little hope for the BT tracking, but a tiny little more for the webcam one(if it doesn't freeze my computer from CPU abuse). 
 
Jul 29, 2016 at 6:33 AM Post #37 of 43
 
I really have to try this someday. the price is right this time IMO. I've been looking at the A8 for years and it was 3000€... with the new model the A8 is now "only" at 2600euro
rolleyes.gif

so new version for a good deal less, we're starting to talk business.
 
on a related matter, I've backed up the NX 3D thing already with little hope for the BT tracking, but a tiny little more for the webcam one(if it doesn't freeze my computer from CPU abuse). 

 
Castleofargh, did you know that you can try the Waves NX for free? Its the studio version, which has more parameters than the kickstarter one. You can use your computers webcam for head-tracking. I tried it, and although it was fun, it was not quite an 'out of the head' experience. The A8 is light-years ahead of the Waves NX, IMO, offering real speaker simulation. The A16 is also ten times the price of the Waves NX, so that also needs to go into the considerations. 
 
Jul 29, 2016 at 9:39 AM Post #38 of 43
I could never get it to work. I soon supposed that it was made to be used in a DAW and not as a foobar DSP, but even then, I got nowhere. can't say if I'm a noob, if my firewall messed up the overly intrusive download and management system, or if my laptop is simply too old and weak, but I didn't have a lot of time and only got my frustration to start. ^_^
I thought that the consumer stuff would be more compatible and easier on the CPU. hope I'm right
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from what I get, it only deals with placement, it doesn't try to simulate a room so I expect what you're describing. just a nice crossfeed that moves with the head, so now actual soundstage.
 
Jan 2, 2017 at 10:09 PM Post #40 of 43
I'm late to come and close my own topic.
 
Quote:
  No, it's fully linked to the shape of your ears, head and torso, imposing the sonic signature to what your ear.  Headphones remove this information and your brain is confused.  If you use HRTF, it helps, but it has to be your specific one.  A Smyth Realizer would be the best solution, but I'm now trying to measure my HRTF to at least project stereo sound forward instead of upward.
 
Moving the head is our natural trick to improve localization of sound.  When you see something that doesn't match what you hear, your reflex is to move your head to solve the issue.

this is true, and it's not. you're right about HRTF but head tracking really tricks me into thinking that mono is closer to being at horizontal level, and everything tends to feel slightly further away.
with head tracking my guess is that I'm using one sense to trick the other into obedience, instead of simply trying to get the proper audio cues. it's wrong, but the result is clearly better than nothing in my case. the same way having actual speakers in front of me, I feel like some sounds are coming from them. I seem to be very gullible when it comes to subjective bias ^_^.
 
while with a "close enough" HRTF for any given angle, I do get the sound to stay mostly horizontal and fairly circular all around(and having never heard that before with headphones, let me tell you this was an amazing experience for me).
so my final word on this is, first, sorry for not replying to you before. I never thought that you were wrong, but I also didn't have any mean to test how it would go by myself. now that I could experiment some more, I can confirm you were right. my specific problem with the center image going up like crazy is a matter of HRTF! and it makes me want the Smyth realiser even more than before. ^_^
 
 
Jan 10, 2017 at 5:42 PM Post #41 of 43
There are a number of phones which have solved this problem by the simple expedient of having the drivers ahead of the ear rather than to the side.  My own are the old Stax Sigmas but the old AKG K1000 will also  do this if you pivot the drivers to face backwards.   Your normal headphone is shooting its signal from the side and gives the auditory system  no information that it should be perceived as coming from in front.  This will be true even foe binaural recordings probably because the the dummy head HTRFs are not the same as yours and the brain is still, correctly, hearing sound coming from the sides. 
 
.  
300x300px-LS-d2d59010_AKG+K1000_6450.jpg
 
 
Jan 10, 2017 at 6:22 PM Post #42 of 43
well I tried the K1000 but I can't remember if it solved my frontal image. at the time I wasn't aware that not everybody had crappy image on headphones or that it could be solved. 
I hope I'll get a change to experiment on that someday. having the driver at an angle would most certainly add at least part of the ear correction, so it's not a bad idea. but there is still the left right mixing and time delay, so I don't know which cues or mix of cues are really making singers go sit on my head so often.
so far I've "simply" taken HRIR from online database, tried them on my headphone until I could find some that were close enough, and messed with those until I could get something that works well for me without creating a panning shift or whatever.
I really don't know enough on the subject and maybe I'm seeing an accidental correlation, but out of the 5 profiles that I kept from here http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/salles/listen/sounds.html because the center was staying low for me(with more or less depth and elevation but still low), all of the subjects are within 1cm of my head circumference(about 62cm). so I wonder if this could be more than a correlation?
 
Sep 26, 2017 at 1:31 PM Post #43 of 43
relevant to this topic https://www.head-fi.org/threads/fro...y-response-with-eq-only.853443/#post-13561451
frequency response is indeed enough to make the center image come down to where I was looking at the speaker, it's far from solving the all headphone way of giving stereo, but this method does solve the issue I posted in this topic. what I posted above actually came reasonably close in term of frequency response if I take the impulses at 0°,0° that best worked for me with the same headphone. so forget all my weird tests and hypothesis, for the center image, and only for the center image, FR is all we have and need to displace a singer up or down.
this is the logical and obvious answer once I think a little.
 

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