It wasn’t until the 1970s that multi-channel sound made it into consumer audio with the arrival of quadraphonics (“quad”). Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1951) was the first multi-channel motion picture release. In the meantime, recording formats were also undergoing their own spatial revolution. By the 1990s, enough data had been gathered about psychoacoustics (along with advances in digital signal processing) that true auralization for headphones was now feasible. Benjamin Bauer, a pioneer in the field, authored several papers on the topic of crossfeed processing for improved headphone listening (today’s commerical crossfeed processors rely heavily on Bauer’s findings).
In the 1960s, audio research was moving in the direction of electronic processing for stereo recordings played back over headphones.
In the 1950s, the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society published several papers on binaural reproduction. Interest in generating realistic sound fields in headphones goes back many decades. The following are excellent introductions to the topic of psychoacoustics: The Elements of Musical Perception, A 3-D Audio Primerand The Psychoacoustics of Headphone Listening.īACKGROUND ON SURROUND-SOUND AND HEADPHONES Only a few of the important pioneers in this field are included due to space limitations, and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies are discussed only briefly. This paper traces the development of 4-channel headphones and acoustic simulators through patent disclosures and technical papers. These are becoming very popular headphone accessories.Īll of these advances have been a long time in coming. Another headphone surround option is surround-sound decoders (also called virtualizers) that feature auralization processing to simulate a virtual surround loudspeakers. The latest research suggests small modifications to the traditional design of 4-channel phones can bring dramatic improvements in spatial resolution. One option for improved headphone surround is to use 4-channel headphones. While the debate continues as to whether music composers may legitimately use space as a compositional tool, film soundtrack editors are busy plotting the sonic trajectories of special effects explosions across a theater, dopplerizing the blare of police sirens and giving the voices of off-screen actors and other sounds a spatial presence. Standard headphones can at least convey a sense of the left-right staging in stereo recordings, but the surround channels have nowhere to go in stereo phones. The distorted spatial reproduction in headphones is particularly objectionable with playback of surround-sound recordings.
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