NextGen Audio: Tempest Engine, Project Acoustics, Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos, DTS X

Localization has (a dynamic) head movement component , and it's not established that ( a static) personalized HRTF is more important , Siegfried Linkwitz argued otherwise.

 

Honestly, the anti-Dolby Atmos brigade are hilarious. Imagine being against what is basically the best and by far most established way to get actual 3D audio, if you have the setup, because *headphones*.
But then rave about things like 120fps which even fewer people can actually see!
I will be using headphones too, and I can still whinge about Sony supporting setups like mine, which are actually not too rare, especially when MS is very open to it.

 

I am not against Dolby Atmos and it will be supported later by Sony. I just say when it will be supported by Sony, the headphones experience will be the best if Sony provide a good approximation of your HRTF. That's just my 2 cents.

 

I specifically called out headphones, both because unmatched sides, and no head movement so far , implied that parroting personalized HRTF solves nil or less than 1/3 of issue at hand.

 

Agreed. It's exactly my point.

How can you claim that fake height effects on headphones are better at providing perception of a sound coming from above than sounds actually coming from above?

Sony doesn't need to support Atmos to provide height channels. You can probably just tell the system which are the height channels and send them through LPCM. Atmos has a limit on objects that Sony wants to circumvent, so supporting Atmos should in theory downgrade the sound source number.

 

Whatever they do I WANT MY 4 HEIGHT SPEAKERS USED AND ABUSED!!!

 

Because if the sound is not coming from exactly where the speaker is you can reproduce it better on an headphones. If it was possible to have full wall and ground speakers, it would be much better than an headphones.

 

Really hope that we would get head movement tracking as well.
Would be awesome to lean bit forward and listen down from a cliff etc.

Also ability to turn toward and follow panning audio would be awesome even outside VR.

 

Split the 3D audio feed of your headphones and redirect the LFE to a hifi receiver. Let the receiver + subwoofer handle the bass and the headset the rest.

You can do it on PC

 

Your speaker system won't have a speaker directly above you so that's fake too.

 

I think you're clearly overestimating your ability to pinpoint sound sources from the top, as well as how good HRTF can be without completely mapping your head through pictures and CT scans, or creating your HRTF map by placing microphones deep inside your ears.

What?

https://www.dolby.com/about/support/guide/speaker-setup-guides/9.1.2-overhead-speaker-setup-guide/

 

Yeah, you can definitely hear behind, below and above you if you have the correct headphones, earphones. I use Sennheiser headphones and CX300-II earphones(used with my PS4 DS controller) and sound is always good.

Also games that use proper surround sound is great. CSGO is exceptional in this regard. I can hear players above, below, behind, far way(far away shot across the map), near etc.

 

That's really good .. especially the above/below demonstration.

 

and you have that in your own home sound system? And you have speakers that come from all directions so that all sound sources aren't fake?

You're missing the point if you're posting images of a speaker that's in that specified direction.
The point is you'll have to simulate fake sounds when the sound source isn't exactly where the speakers are so they're no less fake than headphones.

 

That’s also not entirely correct. There is tridimensionality and wide sound stages with speakers too, so saying that sound always only comes “directly from one speaker” is not exactly true. Sound can move in a wide sound stage with half decent speakers, just like you expect to hear sounds all around you from a pair of simple headphones.

There is a lot of assumptions and misinformation in the thread, when really nobody is pooping on any given way to listen to sound. We’re just asking and waiting for wider support of surround setups some of us have invested in. I’ll enjoy 3D sound with my nice headphones and I will also like to enjoy a full surround through my system. That’s all.

 

The rear top wasn't perfect for me either but I could still tell the difference. The thing that impressed me most though wasn't so much the location of the sound, but the distance of it. I could really tell how far away the sound was coming from and it didn't sound at all like it was coming from a speaker next to my ears. Very impressive!

That said, any headphone based setup has it's downsides as others have mentioned. Namely lack of bass that you can actually feel through your body and the fact that the soundscape moves with your head which can be very off putting if you turn to look off screen (not applicable to VR).

 

I plan to. The only reason I don't have an Atmos setup right now is because I'll be doing construction works in my house next year which will change my living room's layout, and I'll take that opportunity to put embedded ceiling speakers.

Speakers can play the HRTF game too.

Yes, I think there's a strange gatekeeping here going for what is ultimately an accessibility, practicality and cost-saving option (headphones).

 

That’s the long and the short of it. They want it to work so people don’t switch it off and never experience it. I suspect it’s almost ready and they just want to drip feed features.

Think of this, you don’t have any other ears than the 2 the headphones are covering, so ultimately sound will enter just as well as a sound system except it’s easier to control exact locations.

As @pjbliverpool said, it’s the distance (as Cerny said pinpointing exactly where the sound comes from) that headphones should be better at because of the control afforded to devs.

 

Since I’ve done a bit of binaural recording, let me chime in with a couple of observations.
Regarding pinpointing sound sources - humans are really bad at that in a wide zone straight in front of us, extending over our heads backwards. The reason for that is simple, we are primarily visual creatures. We are better at locating sounds in the perifery of our vision and outside it, enabling us to turn our head/eyes towards the sound(threat) and locate and identify the source. That’s why we don’t need sound to be emitted from within a screen, if we see someones mouth moving on screen, that visual cue will dominate over sound of the voice being emitted from a somewhat different location, and the mind will fix the discrepancy for us.

Headphones will always be superior to loudspeakers at recreating a sound space, since the sound of loudspeakers inevitably will reflect (and at certain frequencies, resonate) against the boundaries of the room, superimposing on the sound space recorded/created.

Binaural sound does not have to be recorded at the ear drum, that just causes a lot of problems. (It is however our research heritage, from studies of auditory function). The reason is simple - if you reproduce a sound recorded in the ear canals of a dummy head using headphones, the sound will pass through two outer ears . Those of the dummy head, and those of the listener. You can try to reverse the process after recording if you are hell bent on using your dummy head, but that is just convoluted and creates problems. You should simply record just outside the entrance to the ears, and all the important cues from shoulder/chest reflections, the frequency dependent head occlusIon, the phase difference... will be preserved. And the sound will only be coloured by the ears of the individual listener, which is quite important since ears differ a fair bit.

Obligatory names-dropping - I almost bought an Aachen dummy head off Ken Kantor of NHT speaker fame. I wish I had, it would have been an awesome conversation piece, but I was at a financial ebb, and I had no real use for it. This was before digital processing had really taken off, so unless you used it for measurements, actual recordings through it were flawed as per above.

I think it’s great if sound space simulation takes off, we can potentially do so much today! Can’t wait to experience good examples in future games. But I’m bad at discussing these things. I used to really care.

 

As long as a person's own HRTF map is created. Which is not going to happen very often, anytime soon.