Do the 5.1 Stereo Headphones Really Work?

Tamor asks: "Zalman, the company behind some extremely high quality PC noise-reducing products are now selling real 5.1 surround sound headphones. The surround effect is achieved by placing 3 drivers in each ear-piece. As a geek-with-young-family this product's pushing all the right buttons for me, it looks cool, and means I can finally achieve surround sound without waking the kids. Or does it? I was sure that to place a sound spatially your brain relies on the delay between hearing the sound in one ear and then the other. If your left ear only hears the left 3 channels, and your right ear only hears the right 3 channels isn't this making it more difficult for spatial placement to happen? Do you know if/how these are achieving surround effect if each ear is only hearing half of the audio field?"

Re:Personal experience?

[MImeKillEr]

I'd get a pair if I can get a positive review...

No, you won't. At least, not from Newegg. From their page:

ZALMAN ZM-RS6F Real Surround Sound Headphone -RETAIL

Model# ZM-RS6F
Item # N82E16836501001
Price: $39.99
In Stock: NO

Physics Problem

[WyerByter]

To my understanding, your ear places sounds spatially by volume. It sounds louder in the closer ear.

Beyond that, unless you have a really big head, the difference in arrival time to each ear is less than a microsecond. That is surely too small for your brain to comprehend.

Well calculated delay

[forsetti]

The Headphones are "smart" enough to create an appropriate delay, per channel, to cause that spatial effect you refer to.

google?

[iamjim]

reviews found at:

bigbrui.com [bigbruin.com], overclockersclub.com [overclockersclub.com], modthebox.com [modthebox.com], pcextreme.net [pcextreme.net], Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com], AnandTech.com [anandtech.com], etc...

Read CPU magazine for a review

[phoenix_rizzen]

This month's CPU magazine has a review of these headphones. Don't recall the specifics, but they received a good review. The reviewer found them to be much better than stereo headphones during gaming sessions as you could hear sounds from all directions. But the sound quality for DVD movie playback wasn't so hot.

There might be a copy of the review on their website (no I don't have a URL, use a search engine).

Not to be snarky:

[attaboy]

But the Zalman product page that you linked to in your post had links to several online reviews. Were those insufficient? I found them to give me all the information that I would need to make a $40 purchase...

www.rbmods.com [rbmods.com]

www.hardextreme.org [hardextreme.org]

http://www.fastlanehw.com [fastlanehw.com]

www.itpro.no [fastlanehw.com]

www.hardware-testdk.com [hardware-testdk.com]

ohls-place.com [ohls-place.com]

Re:Physics Problem

[Jerf]

However, back to the topic. You have 2 ears, therefore 2 speakers are enough to create a complete 3D soundscape. The 5.1 headphones are pure gimmick.

The 5.1 headphones would be pure gimmick, if we had been able to work out the sound transformations for convincing the brain a sound is coming from a given direction.

AFAIK, there has been progress in the field but it has hit a wall, and all the demos I've ever heard impart a very synthetic characteristic to the sound vs. the original source. (And I'm not speaking as an "audiophile"; the degradation in sound quality is clearly audible to me.)

The headphones can off-load these computations that are so freakishly complex we still can't do them onto reality itself, since "reality" remains better then any algorithm we've put together yet and doesn't sound synthetic.

Now, I've never used these or even heard of these, but I can easily believe that they are more then a gimmick at our current levels of understanding of sound spatialization. Nor would I expect two-speaker setups (headphones or otherwise) to match these any time in the forseeable future.

There are some (classical) recordings out there that are done using a fake head, with mic in place of the eardrums.

This goes to prove my point. Normally "preprocessing" sound before it gets to production is an anathema to a sound engineer; there's virtually nothing you can do to improve the sound while recording it, except record it with higher fidelity. "Aural recording" (if that's the name) is an exception, because you can't add that in post-processing, no matter what inputs you provide yourself. If it was something that could be added in post-processing, the sound engineers would insist on doing so to maintain maximal control over the sound.

Re:Physics Problem

[pbox]

Now, I've never used these or even heard of these, but I can easily believe that they are more then a gimmick at our current levels of understanding of sound spatialization. Nor would I expect two-speaker setups (headphones or otherwise) to match these any time in the forseeable future.

I agree.

So to summarize all this:

1. If the recording is mode with the fake-head, it is best to use 2.0 headphones / in-ear-canal or otherwise.
2. Rest of stereo audio sources are best with a 2.0 headphones
3. Computer generated sounds (especially FPS) best with 5.1 headphones (no or less calc involved)
4. DVD-Audio, SACD 5.1 sources are best with 5.1 headphones, IF are not remastered from a stereo source, but rather are recorded with 5 mono microphones.

Does anyone can improve / extend on above, please post.

Re:Physics Problem

[Reducer2001]

Nice info in parent post. The recording technique is called binaural [binaural.com] recording.

Re:3d sound with 2-speakers

[mnbjhguyt]

this kind of effect has been around for quite some time (best known example is the beginning of the final cut album from pink floyd) (hint: google for holophonia or holophonics)

iirc it's actually very simple, the sounds were recorded using a dummy head with two mikes where the ears would have been

For the smart-asses, the answer

[Tamor]

I found out the actual answer to my question, and no it isn't on Zalman's site or in the reviews, and yes I expect that they did think about this before putting a product out. The answer is that the pinna (the outer part of the ear) catches the sound and funnels it down to the ear-drum. The folds and curves of the pinna alter the waveform of the sound as its funneled, and this happens in different ways depending on the direction in which the sound enters the pinna. The brain picks up those differences and is able to tell whether a sound originated in front, behind, above, below etc. So that's how you're able to spatially place a sound you can only hear in one ear. Neat.

Re:No.

[Frans Faase]

This argument is completely of the mark. The brains does contain specialized areas for detecting the delay. For low tones the spikes produced by the detecting hair cell, match the wave front. These are than transported to an area in the brain where there is a line of cells where the signals from both ears are at opposite ends. The cells where the signals arrive at the same time (depending on the delay caused by the spike to travel through that cell in the line) produce the strongest response and determine the direction from which the sound originates.