Audio PC DAC amp and headphone

[The Flying Sloth]

1 minute ago, geo3 said:

The problem is that everyone has different shaped ears and our brains have learned to interoperate positional sound as it's effected by that specific shape. The virtual effect has no way of knowing the shape of the individuals ear. So what we are hearing is sound as it's shaped by some generalized ear. I guess for people who's ear is close to that general ear shape the effect will work better.  I've tried Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos and the Sennheiser implementations and they all fail. Sennheiser fails less so however, they at least give some sense of positionality, but add this awful tin box effect that's just natural at all .  I've heard a couple preprocessed effects, ones baked into the recording, that sounded passable, but not great.  But the ones done on the fly are terrible.

Ambeo works pretty good if you implement it well, I use their Orbit plugin a tonne when I'm placing instruments in a mix. Other than that I can't say I have much experience besides baked in binaural surround with plugins like the aforementioned Valve one.

 

Sure the real time ones aren't the highest resolution but how can you expect them to be? They don't have that long to process the audio for you so it's a trade off, you have to decide if you want the positionality at the cost of resolution or not.

[fred82]

1 hour ago, geo3 said:

In the most technical sense, yes this works. The surround effect is done digitally in software on the PC and then passed through your dac and amp and you do get the effect on the other end. That said. It doesn't work well, but this is true regardless of what your signal chain looks like. 

 

The only "good" solution is a real physical 7.1 speaker set up. All of the software solutions I've heard are trash.  The only virtual surround solution I've heard, or even heard of, that is passable is the Sennheiser GSX 1000, which is a dac/amp that can do virtual 7.1 on the device itself. (It will present itself to the PC as a 7.1 device) The effect is pretty meh though. But you can actually discern some directionality to the sound. It still sounds like trash like listening inside a tin box. It does allow you to turn the effect off and fall back to 2 if you want to listen to music. 

yep sometimes i think doing so. of course all this interpretated by your hears (not a point L and point R anyway) .... but that's why the intelligence of all this works better when it is not virtual since virtual is not made perfect simulation. so yep thinking doing both. still i already played with headset and it is not bad for simple features :but it is really hard to get the plane is on the sky except that you know it is in the sky naturally or that the guy speaking louder is in front of you not in back wit hkind of less clear voice....

so it is like optical anyway: optics if just your brain . there is no real world of colors: this interpretation fo your brain to 3D see and position te objects and understand which object it is (different material different colors) .. well we are duped but duped in a good way so that helps us "see or hear "the world around us

i mean that's all about interpretation that is necessary in our evolution of specy  and that our virtual simulators .. are far far from being good enough 

bt let's hope it will improve. but for sure as u say.. now the 7.1 stuff will of course be better