What is better: Dolby Atmos headphones or 7.1 headphones

[MrDBD]

I already have a Dolby Atmos license and I’m wondering if it’s worth investing in 7.1 headphones.

[DANK_AS_gay]

34 minutes ago, MrDBD said:

I already have a Dolby Atmos license and I’m wondering if it’s worth investing in 7.1 headphones.

For $3k to $6k? What are you trying to do? Watch movies? Make movies? Make video games? 

If you are making, I would go for the headphones.

If you are just consuming media, for $3k-$6k you could have a VERY nice surround sound speaker setup.

I don't have much experience in the matter, so take this with a grain of salt, but the Meze Empyreans look good at $3k. 

[saintlouisbagels]

Neither. Get yourself a great pair of stereo headphones and you'll still have great 'surround' sound.

 

If you're all about getting a wide soundstage with good imaging, you should look into getting open-back headphones. The big downside is that sound will leak, so it's not advisable in a shared space. Sennheiser HD600 is a pretty legendary headphone in this space and Linus was using it during his work-from-home WAN Show setup.

 

My personal favorite is the Beyerdynamic DT 770 80ohm. It's a closed back with amazing bass, and it still simulate a great, large soundstage. Also ultra comfortable.

[MrDBD]

26 minutes ago, hippocheese14 said:

Neither. Get yourself a great pair of stereo headphones and you'll still have great 'surround' sound.

 

If you're all about getting a wide soundstage with good imaging, you should look into getting open-back headphones. The big downside is that sound will leak, so it's not advisable in a shared space. Sennheiser HD600 is a pretty legendary headphone in this space and Linus was using it during his work-from-home WAN Show setup.

 

My personal favorite is the Beyerdynamic DT 770 80ohm. It's a closed back with amazing bass, and it still simulate a great, large soundstage. Also ultra comfortable.

Thanks!

[OfficialTechSpace]

7.1 means nothing in the headphone world, nor does any form of 3D audio or surround-sound. It's all marketing nonsense made up to compensate for a sh*tty headphone design, trying to make you think it's special by bundling a useless DSP software. It doesn't work, it's all placebo. A headphone with superior stereo imaging/soundstage will win every time, you can't jam 8 channels of audio through 2 stereo channels. 2 is 2, stereo is 2. You can't add drivers using aoftware.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, OfficialTechSpace said:

7.1 means nothing in the headphone world, nor does any form of 3D audio or surround-sound. It's all marketing nonsense made up to compensate for a sh*tty headphone design, trying to make you think it's special by bundling a useless DSP software. It doesn't work, it's all placebo. A headphone with superior stereo imaging/soundstage will win every time, you can't jam 8 channels of audio through 2 stereo channels. 2 is 2, stereo is 2. You can't add drivers using aoftware.

To be fair, there do exist headphones that have crammed 8 channels into the damn thing with tiny tiny drivers. Though I imagine they would suck massively in comparison to a comparably priced good pair of stereo headphones when looking just at audio quality.

[OfficialTechSpace]

57 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

To be fair, there do exist headphones that have crammed 8 channels into the damn thing with tiny tiny drivers. Though I imagine they would suck massively in comparison to a comparably priced good pair of stereo headphones when looking just at audio quality.

They do, they're also still not actually 7.1 surround. They're stereo split into 8 tiny drivers. True 7.1 means having dedicated left front, center front, right front, left side, right side, left rear, and right rear drivers, plus a dedicated subwoofer. Having 8 small drivers placed on either side of your head still isn't 7.1 because nothing's actually in front or behind you. Everything's beside you, just like stereo. Then you have to account for the dead space between the drivers, which at that small of a scale and in close-quarters ruins imaging capabilities.

[cmndr]

2 hours ago, OfficialTechSpace said:

They do, they're also still not actually 7.1 surround. They're stereo split into 8 tiny drivers. True 7.1 means having dedicated left front, center front, right front, left side, right side, left rear, and right rear drivers, plus a dedicated subwoofer. Having 8 small drivers placed on either side of your head still isn't 7.1 because nothing's actually in front or behind you. Everything's beside you, just like stereo. Then you have to account for the dead space between the drivers, which at that small of a scale and in close-quarters ruins imaging capabilities.

It's been AGES since I had it and I can't remember the model number but I had some turtle beach headphones that actually required 3 aux cables for inputs. They also had multiple drivers.

To 18 year old me (with minimal exposure to other headphones) they sounded pretty good. I think I had windows set on default so it was probably just regular stereo hitting my ears using only 2 drivers.

These things DO exist. They're still mostly gimmicks though and you're definitely better off with just two GOOD full range drivers in a set of headphones since that avoids effects like comb filtering.

It's a similar story for downmixing. There's arguably SOME benefit from having more data BUT a lot of the processing creates artifacts. It's more of a set of tradeoffs than a pure win and in many cases it's worth disabling and just using 2 channel stereo.

[GoldenSound]

Both are just software trickery to try to emulate a surround sound result (usually poorly).
The actual hardware is no different at all.

[CTR640]

Manufacturers/OEM spends a lot on marketing bullshit so bad informed people will believe 7.1 headphones sounds better than stereo headphones.

It comes down to placebo effect too indeed and that's why morons will believe $2500 audiophile-graded ssd will make audiofiles sound different than on regular ssd's. Or motherboards and ethernet "designed" for audio.

 

This is what you'll get if you want 7.1 on your face:

 

 

[megarambo]

On 6/28/2022 at 9:38 PM, OfficialTechSpace said:

7.1 means nothing in the headphone world, nor does any form of 3D audio or surround-sound. It's all marketing nonsense made up to compensate for a sh*tty headphone design, trying to make you think it's special by bundling a useless DSP software. It doesn't work, it's all placebo. A headphone with superior stereo imaging/soundstage will win every time, you can't jam 8 channels of audio through 2 stereo channels. 2 is 2, stereo is 2. You can't add drivers using aoftware.

Well that's not completely true. There is binaural decoding made specially for headphone listening. It consists of horizontal ambisonics channels and utilizes HRTFs. It's part of surround sound and well made audio mixes for this format sound very much differently than stereo. When working with Atmos you can monitor output with binaural decoder and the results are quite good. 

EDIT: You don't need additional DSP software to listen o it because its written into the audio file.