[gregorio]

I think Dolby is just starting to promote some sort of headphone surround format. The one on the Kraftwerk box has a special logo and everything. It might just be some sort of fold down, but it does sound different than the regular stereo version.

The new Dolby Headphone surround is designed for Dolby Atmos, where the exact positioning of some of the sounds in the mix are precisely defined, which allows (in theory) for a more precise application of binaural principles to the fold-down. It is also backwards compatible, so it will also work with a 5.1/7.1 mix, although less precisely. So yes, it should sound significantly different to a straight stereo fold-down (which doesn't have any binaural principles applied). The caveat is of course that it's applying general binaural principles, rather than the binaural principles specific to each individual user, so it can be rather hit or miss depending on the material and individual listener and, if it's being fed a 5.1/7.1 mix it's probably not significantly better than other software that does this.

To get the best out of it, would require having a Dolby Headphone encoder and decoder in the monitoring chain and then creating a Dolby Atmos mix using this monitoring chain. As far as I'm aware, no one is doing this, they're creating a single Dolby Atmos mix (using a Dolby Atmos speaker setup) and then feeding the resultant mix to the Dolby headphone encoder to do it's thing, rather than creating a dedicated mix.

G