[castleofargh]

OMG, the dress is blue. I said I played a lot of games but forgot to mention how bad I am ^_^. thanks for the cue. I still found the same address without the "h" in his bio so I kind of completed the quest right?
silly silly unfocused me.

 

[abm0]

I wonder what result we could get if we were to calibrate on that while using a crossfeed effect we already like? might be fun.

While calibrating? Surely you mean after calibrating, i.e. to apply crossfeed in addition to the personal HRTF compensation determined with his method. As I understand it, his app's final curve (with parameter subtract=1) compensates for the particular shape of your head, which should immediately allow you to get a realistic impression if listening to binaural recordings. If you wanted to listen to non-binaural recordings and still get some kind of realistic localization, then you would need the crossfeed on top of that, only in this case the crossfeed would finally be able to do the standardized (non-HRTF-dependent) job it was meant to do. Then yes, this would make it even more exciting, as it could for example give me the benefits I never heard from all the fancy Meier or Isone crossfeed effects, and might improve my experience of most of my music (none of which is binaurally recorded), going beyond the immediate benefits promised by Griesinger who only talks about binaural recordings.

 

[castleofargh]

no I did mean while, just to try. of course it would go outside binaural use. and of course it wouldn't be my first test. just something for fun, to try and "see" if it would make me go for about the same signature, or if my brain would involve the signal that has crossed over to the other channel. I have some very basic understanding but they're global stuff, I never focused only on getting the center right in proper tests(because my method so far was a mix of measurements and Joe Bloggs's thread so it was really time consuming).
as for crossfeeds being non HRTF dependent, I wish. they're just not based on mine but follow some standard of a head.
I've tried a bunch of things already for myself and that damn center image that rises up on my forehead, and I remember that when I was still trying to find some HRTF close to mine to generate an impulse for convolution at a given angle, I also tried mixing them with the Waves NX 3D stuff they sell with a relatively bad head tracker. so instead of using the impulses for 30 and 330° to try and get more speaker like directions, I would try with 90° and change the angle within WaveNX. and I tried a few other angle combinations but not a lot because it always resulted in a worst center image than just using from 0 to about 45° impulses from a "close enough" HRTF of somebody else.

so yes with a much easier way to calibrate the center FR like the tool Mr Griesinger has, I would try that and probably a bunch of other things. and of course once the new Smith Realiser comes out, I plan to test and measure everything I can think of. if only to see if I could have improved on my crossover settings or if I was already at the end of what the tech could do for me. and for that isone and all its settings should be the perfect candidate.

 

[ThatJackElliott]

abm0 wrote, like a million years ago, "Tried it in Audacity on a Windows XP. Nope. Just as unconvincing as every other crossfeed plugin (including the much touted Meier Crossfeed, which I tried in the form that comes included with foobar2000 on Android). The unchanging fact is: nothing sounds like it's in front of me when I'm listening on headphones."

I stand to be counted among those who have never experienced the sound coming from in front of me instead of between my ears when using headphones with whatever DSP I've tried. OOYH, Isone, Meier -- whatever. Alas. I would like to get the music out of my head!

 

[abm0]

I stand to be counted among those who have never experienced the sound coming from in front of me instead of between my ears when using headphones with whatever DSP I've tried. OOYH, Isone, Meier -- whatever. Alas. I would like to get the music out of my head!

I've had some results in the meantime with David Griesinger's method, but it only fully works in combination with semi-binaural(?) recordings made by him with a special setup, or with some of the crossfeed plugins mentioned above (tried it with Meier in Foobar, and with UAPP's own crossfeed), but in the second case it still depends a lot on the recording you're listening to. (I haven't investigated what qualities of "flat-stereo" recordings work well with the Griesinger Equalization + generic crossfeed effect, so I can't give any pointers on that.)

 

[Sweden]

abm0 wrote, like a million years ago, "Tried it in Audacity on a Windows XP. Nope. Just as unconvincing as every other crossfeed plugin (including the much touted Meier Crossfeed, which I tried in the form that comes included with foobar2000 on Android). The unchanging fact is: nothing sounds like it's in front of me when I'm listening on headphones."

I stand to be counted among those who have never experienced the sound coming from in front of me instead of between my ears when using headphones with whatever DSP I've tried. OOYH, Isone, Meier -- whatever. Alas. I would like to get the music out of my head!

What headphones are you using?
I find the HD800 to be the optimal headphone for Isone when calibrated. You lose a bit of fidelity, but this headphone has fidelity in spades to it's a good trade (at times).
Isone is however just a poor man's Smyth Realiser when it comes to a realistic out of head experience.

 

[ThatJackElliott]

I have a few headphones. For live recordings and broadcasts of music festivals and orchestral concerts I use a pair of Bose Quietcomforts. I want maximum isolation so I can concentrate on the live mix without the distraction of the venue's sound. When engineering spoken-word recordings (interviews, etc.) I tend to use my Sony MDR-7506s. For general-purpose listening, classical, mainly, I use a pair of ATH-M50xBLs 'cause they have a funky 70s vibe to the color scheme and sound pretty good for closed-back 'phones. In all cases the headphones are closed-back for sound isolation: either to block outside sounds (traffic while strolling down a street and listening to a ppp passage in an adagio) or to reduce annoyance to others, such as my wife seated next to me who is watching television while I'm listening. At $1,000, the HD800s are out of the question -- that's nearly a month's income for me.

I'm surprised that after all these years since stereophony was in its early days, with all the advances in psychoacoustics and with today's DSP processing, that this nut hasn't been cracked: processing random stereo recordings so they sound like they are in front of me on headphones. It must be a lot harder than it seems.

 

[castleofargh]

it's really not. the issue is how each person would ideally need a custom profile. determining that custom custom profile is the issue. with the 3D googles being a hot topic for a few years, many people got forced to think about the issue to offer better than a crappy standards that work great for almost nobody. and having movements involved forced them to stop the kid stuff with crossfeed, and really try to get a hrtf model. one approach I've seen was some work done to make "good enough" models based on a "good enough" scan of the user's head with a cellphone. that's a promising solution. and with ATMOS being apparently a standard that might survive a few years and be more than a niche like so many others, there is hope for proper stereo on headphones coming our way.
I guess right now nothing beats binaural microphones, real life recording and convolution, but it's not the most consumer friendly approach. which IMO explains why so few solutions are coming out based on it. but I join you wondering why so few people are interested in solving this once and for all when we have the knowledge and the computing abilities. in a hobby where realistic and neutral is on every noob's lips, we must have quite the selective blindness to pretend like headphone listening of albums made for speakers is fine as it is. I really hope more solutions will come, and at a cheap price.

 

[abm0]

I guess right now nothing beats binaural microphones, real life recording and convolution

Binaural microphones worn on the same head that will listen to the recording later? Or where does the HRTF come into this? Because no recordings made with binaural microphones on dummy heads have ever sounded frontal to me, ever. A few of them can sound very realistic if I'm told to expect sounds coming from the sides and behind (like in that popular "virtual barber shop" demo), but nothing in them is ever frontal.

 

[castleofargh]

Binaural microphones worn on the same head that will listen to the recording later? Or where does the HRTF come into this? Because no recordings made with binaural microphones on dummy heads have ever sounded frontal to me, ever. A few of them can sound very realistic if I'm told to expect sounds coming from the sides and behind (like in that popular "virtual barber shop" demo), but nothing in them is ever frontal.

I meant measured on the final listener. a fully custom solution.
about your issue (and mine), I've don't remember if I mentioned this here, but I've seen some correlation between the size of the head and how well someone else's HRTF data works on me. I haven't found anything to call statistically significant, but after trying a bunch of the profiles available online, I noticed this head size thing afterward, when I had kept only the ones giving me a reasonably circular "image". so maybe there are some aspects that could be classified in groups of people instead of needing to be fully custom?
as for having the sound in front of us instead of up or down, Mr Griesinger has finished to convince me that the FR of the headphone was the one relevant variable. but that sadly means custom setting one way or another.

 

[abm0]

maybe there are some aspects that could be classified in groups of people instead of needing to be fully custom?

I certainly hope so. This has occurred to me as well - that maybe "good enough" effects can be obtained for 99% of listeners if we apply one of a few classes of HRTFs instead of using expensive full calibration procedures. Seems like a more mass-marketable/realistic solution than the Realizer or anything involving custom recordings (including the Griesinger method). The people at Toneboosters seem to have thought something along similar lines, as I see they've included only head-size and ear-size controls in Isone Pro. Sadly, they didn't label them with any measuring units so we'll know what size exactly we're tweaking.

 

[castleofargh]

relevant to our conversation https://www.head-fi.org/threads/smyth-research-realiser-a16.807459/page-97#post-13867967

 

[yates7592]

Would somebody please be able to upload or send me a link to the free 'Toneboosters IsoneSurround' VST (not the earlier 'Pro' version)? It doesn't exist on the TB website anymore, but it was also included in some of their earlier AllPlugins bundles. Thanks!

 

[kalston]

Would somebody please be able to upload or send me a link to the free 'Toneboosters IsoneSurround' VST (not the earlier 'Pro' version)? It doesn't exist on the TB website anymore, but it was also included in some of their earlier AllPlugins bundles. Thanks!

Hi, it is possible to get it by using https://archive.org/web/ (this is how I got the x64 version since I only ever had x32 version until now). But to save you the hassle I can upload them somewhere or email them to you if you want.

Btw it is very easy to use Isone or Isone Surround system wide nowadays on Windows 10 (can't guarantee it works well and with low enough latency on Win 7) with the free "Equalizer APO" (zero latency and no audio glitches or anything - suitable for gaming/movies/browsing - everything). Heavily recommended!

 

[Jose Hidalgo]

Hi, I see that this thread has been inactive for 3 years now.
Is Isone still "the best thing" for our headphones, or are there better things now ?
I'm looking for binaural / spatialization stuff.
Thanks in advance