So despite the fact that the Super X-Fi demo worked amazingly well for me for, literally, about ten seconds, I’m not sure if there’s a viable product here.ĭuraiswami’s presentation convinced me that this technology has legs. The app also requires use of its embedded music player - and few people will tolerate a second-rate interface for the sake of better sound, especially after they’ve been spoiled by the user-friendly interfaces of Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz. My post-CES attempts to shoot pictures of my ears and face and use the app to calculate my HRTF have all failed because the app is buggy and it refused to upload the data. The CES demo was buggy to say the least, and they used insert microphones to create HRTF profiles for the listeners - which led me to believe the photo-based Super X-Fi technology wasn’t reliable enough for a tradeshow demo. The technology is called Super X-Fi, and it’s available in Creative’s Super X-Fi Amp. And as Duraiswami pointed out, directly measuring HRTF - a process that typically requires an anechoic chamber, a complicated array of speakers and/or microphones, and about an hour of time - isn’t practical, either.Īt CES in January, Creative Labs presented a potentially more practical solution: a smartphone app that lets you take pictures of your earlobes and your face, then calculates your HRTF and creates a processing algorithm that can fool you into thinking you’re hearing real speakers. Obviously, it’s wildly optimistic to assume that consumers will be willing to spend thousands for a Smyth Realiser, or to insert microphones into their ears and run a bunch of test tones through a set of speakers to calibrate the processor. That impression of having the audio emerging from the center of your head disappears - and the effect is far more natural and powerful than any “one size fits all” technology such as crossfeed circuits or Dolby Headphone can deliver. Basically, headphones with accurate, personalized HRTF processing don’t sound like headphones at all. We’re talking a huge leap in realism here - even more dramatic than you’d get by going from a good set of $100 headphones to the multi-thousand-dollar models from Focal, HiFiMan, and Meze. The result was the most realistic sound I’ve heard from headphones since the late 1990s, when I’d had my HRTF measured by a company named Virtual Listening Systems. I tackled this topic in my June 2016 column that described the Smyth Realiser A8 headphone processor, which uses tiny microphones inserted into the ears to measure the listener’s HRTF. The problem is that just as everyone’s physical characteristics are different, so are their HRTFs. By precisely replicating a person’s HRTF using digital processing, it’s possible to restore a natural sense of spatiality and directionality when listening through headphones or earphones. Headphones and earphones bypass our HRTFs, which is why center images from headphones seem to come from inside our heads. It’s a process called head-related transfer function, or HRTF. Our brains evaluate the way the reflections and frequency-response alterations caused by these physical factors differ from the direct sound. As he explained, the crux of the problem lies in the fact that we localize sounds based on a number of physical factors, including the shape of the pinnae, as well as the size and shapes of the head and shoulders. Duraiswami’s presentation didn’t awaken me to any concepts I hadn’t heard of before - but it did give me the faith that the processing needed to make headphones sound as good and natural as a high-quality set of stereo (or surround) speakers is within our grasp.ĭuraiswami’s presentation explored methods for getting 3D sound reproduction from headphones. My vision came during a presentation by Ramani Duraiswami, a professor at the University of Maryland and also president and founder of VisiSonics, a company dedicated to 3D audio reproduction, mostly for gaming applications. I think I saw the future of headphone technology at the recent 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Headphone Technology, held in San Francisco from August 27 to 29.
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