Page 5 - SoundXPlosion

The SoundXPlosion
As I said, I like the idea of surround-sound headphones but I'm suspicious. The main idea behind headphones is that since we have two ears, why not deliver the proper channel they're supposed to hear? This channel isolation increases realism, the expression of the sound stage if you will and increases ye olde suspension of disbelief. One would think that surround-sound headphones would be ideal, wouldn't one?

Of course there's a catch.

With regular stereophonic speakers sound bounces around the room and the ears hear both channels, albeit with a slight delay.  This is interaural crosstalk. It's generally bad because it deteriorates what was originally recorded.  Most recording engineers compensate for it, and some headphone amplifiers will add small amounts of it (like the Headroom) to avoid the 'in the head' syndrome.  But currently, sound engineers are not routinely recording with surround sound in mind. Stereo is still king. Give it a few years and I'm sure we'll see great progress.

Now, the brain is very well adapted to hear in 3D which makes it very hard to fool. With the advent of surround sound and decent digital processing, there's a chance to totally envelop the ears, fooling them good.

Of course there's another catch.

Everybody's shoulders, head and ears are different. They're bloody well like fingerprints. Some very smart people took a look at the problem and came up with the idea of the Head Related Transfer Function, the HRTF. Take all the math of sound reflecting/diffracting around the upper torso, filtering through that mop in need of a haircut and finally swirling through the pinnae into the ear canal.  That's an HRTF and everybody's got their own unique HRTF. Now there are some general HRTF's that worked out on dummies (I'm not kidding), which are used in DSP's and API's, but they aren't custom. Those HRTF's work okay, sometimes. Yes, to make a horrible pun, you can fool some of the ears some of the time, but you can't fool all the ears all the time.

Getting back to the SoundXPlosion, it is a 5.1 surround sound headset. The earpads look like they will scrunch your ears like Grados are known to do, but they are circumaural and fit nicely around your ears, like some Sennheisers. The headrest is fairly comfortable for long periods of gaming, since the band auto-adjusts to your head and the whole headset is much lighter than you expect.

There are four drivers in each side, one for each channel. They are closed back, too, which means they will block out some incoming sound, so you won't hear that call from the student loan people. My Grados dont do that. To get the subwoofer to rumble like you know you like it, you have to enable the feature in the driver.