Truly, the car must be considered an important reference in this day, Also its worth mentioning that fidelity in general has taken a severe downturn. Some of my clients consider me overzealous, but they are bringing me "beats" on mp3s! It is the job to be that way. When they hear the final on horns its eye opening for some of us. Only headphones can compete with horns speakers as far as HARMONIC DISTORTION is concerned, in my ever so humble opinion of course. (-:
I'm with you on that. Binaural Rocks. With speakers you have that second occurance of inter-aural crosstalk, which renders the ear-brain mechanism confused in the frequency range below about 800HZ, so our ability so sense image location is substantially compromised. A binaural recording played back through headphones gives you that low end imaging back. A stunning improvement. If only speakers could have imaging that good.
I use a variation of the Carver holographic generator circuit on my main system, and the Polk style acoustic hologram function on my soundbar (stereo center channel speaker). These work pretty good if your head is in exactly the right place left to right, and the speakers are at least several feet away from side walls. I downloaded a bunch of free binaural recordings off the web to test these techniques. Not perfect but pretty good. Worth it if you don't mind arranging things so your head is exactly between the two speakers. Off axis it sounds better with the hologram function disabled.
IEM can have extremely low nonlinearity despite the fact that the transducers are inherently nonlinear. This is because of the huge efficiency that one gets by driving a closed ear canal. No loudspeaker can match these low levels of nonlinearity (of course there is a threshold of audibility and many loudspeakers fall below it so that this point is moot.)
One other point. Having designed many IEMs I can tell you that using multiple transducers is more hype than reality. The best IEMs that I have ever measured were single transducer devices.
Wouldn't enclosing the ear alter the resonance along the ear canal, and would it be noticeable.. for example, where the distance made with an occluding headphone is significant?
Yes, this is a factor, but is usually dealt with by adding back in this resonance. How this is done is a matter of debate.
Does not the usable "efficiency" go out the door when you subtract the noise floor? I learned very fast in my "psuedo whip" that with the road/engine/people noise you do not have much DR to work with, and you better well have that efficiency. One speaker? Well yes ideally a big horn high dispersion, dead center of windshield. (-:
I think I know why you don't understand what he is talking about.
He means audio reproduction in a car while you were talking about reproducing or influencing a car's sound as such some posts before.
Or maybe I didn't understand anything correctly at all ........
He means audio reproduction in a car while you were talking about reproducing or influencing a car's sound as such some posts before.
Or maybe I didn't understand anything correctly at all ........
Well, maybe not that hard once you've figured it out! 😀 For many of us, not so easy.
I've heard only ONE headphone virtualizer that worked for me - it was a DTS demo system. And that illusion was very real, tho somewhat fragile. I have yet to hear the Smyth Realizer, but it gets glowing reviews from people who've used it.
Not that I haven't searched. I've tried every binaural recording, DSP and virtual this or that I could find. None worked for me. They generally sound better than the normal stuff, but they don't do the "Outside the Head" illusion for me. Would love to find something that works for me.
I've even gone as far as to record my own HRTF and use convolution engines to apply the effect. I've only succeeded in moving the sounds to the outside edge of the headphones. Never out into the room. Certainly I'm doing something wrong. Sigh.....
When you convolved your HRTFs did you also include the headphones response and the effect of the occlusion of the ears? You can't just do the HRTFs, that is not enough. Then there is the problem of "which HRTFs?" To what point do you do the HRTfs? The ear drum? The entrance to the canal? Open or closed? These things all mater.
What it obviously means is the noise floor in a non-quiet moving auto quicky converges with the available power of the system, leaving you a scant few db's of usable DR if you are lucky. What has always been needed in autos is a simple one knob compressor. Louder roads, loads, and car full of toads, higher compression ratio. I had a tbird which mechanically raised the volume up and down with the speed of the car. Not quite a copressor, but you would be amazed how loud the stereo if you turned it to that position while parked.
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Correct Pete, what is needed in a car environment is a HIGH level setting (loudness) and a LOW level setting (compression). Some cars factory system tries to achieve this automagically wrt. to speed. An adaptive system, with mics sampling the noise level would be nice?
What is also missing with headphone listening is the involuntary sampling of the soundfield (with head movement) that occurs in a natural environment.
Sadly the same is also missing with 2 channel listening. It could be said that 99% of the information is lost with microphone recordings IF we try to recreate a convincing natural, or synthetic, environment. Luckily when our listening space is part of the performance (they are here), we can retain some of the naturalness.
Sadly the same is also missing with 2 channel listening. It could be said that 99% of the information is lost with microphone recordings IF we try to recreate a convincing natural, or synthetic, environment. Luckily when our listening space is part of the performance (they are here), we can retain some of the naturalness.
Yes, I did the impulse response of the headphone on my ears with exactly the same mics in my ears. Tried various methods of combining that with the HRTF. Some of it worked OK (mostly tonal balance was better) but no success getting the sounds externalized.
I'm very sure they do! Thus my limited success. I do know that the Smyth places mics in the ear and calibrates with a series of chirps from the speakers. Beyond that, I don't know what they are doing. The DTS demo was impressive because the processing was generic. One size fit almost all.
My friends who tested and liked the Smyth Realizer tried each others settings. Their comments were "You sure have some ***ed up ears!"
I've been wanting to start a thread on the subject, now may be the time.
A stock Civic has a compressor that samples enviromental cabin noise? How nice to hear! I dont recall the old '4 Accura having it, though it probably had less need. My current Hyundai does not either.
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This is why I've given up on the traditional stereo set up. I use an open back box speaker in mono. The sound of stereo feels false to me, something that took me many years to finally realize. The open back speaker spews sound into the room most effectively so that what I hear is modified by the room itself and this sounds more natural to me than trying to impose the sound of the recording environment on to my listening room. It is a valid goal to try and reproduce the experience of the original live recording environment and some folk like to feel as if there are 'right there' but it's very hard to do that and if you only partially succeed it isn't satisfying. My approach is to choose to not to try and transport myself to the opera, but bring the opera into my room, warts and all. I don't think stereo is consistent with that goal, indeed I've failed to get it to sound 'right' to me, but mono does well.
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