Yep! If it's one thing Impulcifer has taught me it's that your other senses "hear". Hearing is a multi sensory experience - I've cited it before but my HRIR I generate in my theater sounds IDENTICAL to the real thing in the same room. I took that same HRIR into a cafe (pre covid!) and it sounded like ass. Dolby Virtual Headphone blew it away.
I tried David C's loudness matching and just couldn't really do it, I only gave it one shot though, might try it again.
I guess I'll stick to the synthetic HRIR's for my Air Pods Pros and rely on my Bose 700s for my theater when I need ANC
It also seems like we're not equals when it comes to the impact of certain cues. I'm a total slave to visual cues. I sort of knew it, but for a long time I assumed it was just standard human behavior prioritizing sight(after all it's the bigger area allocation for the brain). But in the last years discussing and reading everything I can find on psychoacoustics, it has becomes apparent that my eyes do even more "hearing" than for the average guy. I guess it started when people made fun of me at an audio meeting for having the habit to close my eyes to test gears.
The best thing I did for my headphone setup at my desk was to put some speaker monitors on the desk, and elevate them at my level. They're like sound magnets, anything I feel in the general direction of the speakers gets stuck on them(in my mind^_^). If I move my head everything collapses, but it comes back pretty fast. Even some very average crossfeed DSP works fairly well if I don't move much.
Head tracking on the A16 with the right impulses for all directions, works great without needing the speakers as visual anchors, but it still helps in my case and I still get influenced to some degree. I played moving them around and even almost 45° to the side, after a while not moving my head much, I feel like they're emitting the sound. It blows my conscious mind.
But then I've seen people who don't even care to use a head tracker, and people who only see minimal improvements between vague Xfeed effect and HRIR. I mean some people even say that default headphone playback without any DSP, makes them feel like they're front raw at a concert. I always thought it was BS, but apparently not. Our imagination is the limit and in this case, I might be lacking because the best I can get from typical stereo albums with unprocessed headphone signal, is lateralization and the singer+drums usually sitting on my forehead unless they're panned in some way.
Oh and of course, like you I can get pretty different feelings depending on the room size and where I'm sited. It's annoying because it puts pretty hard limits to what I can hope to simulate. Some of the best headphone experience I got in my life were in a completely dark room where I couldn't see anything. The "image" I get can be pretty badass after a while. Maybe some people experience that with their eyes open? IDK.
