Most Immersive Audio Headphones

I've been using the Corsair Vengeance 1500's and they seem pretty good to me. Granted they are virtual "7.1" headphones, but the sound is decent quality and they have a wireless version too if you're into that sort of thing. They are still somewhat lacking in terms of the immersiveness of the sound, though I guess this is an issue with most headphones I have tried. They are at least comfortable, which is nice, and they look pretty slick. Overall not bad.

http://www.corsair.com/vengeance-1500-d ... adset.html

I used a pair of Tritton AX360 5.1 for several years and found the positional audio to work very well. I'm hardly an audiophile though and didn't miss the surround headphones too much when switching to a nice stereo pair recently.

Also, hello there fellow Calgarians! Who wants to share their Rift with me and ease the pain of waiting? There's beer in it for you!

All my gaming buddies and I swear by the G930 wireless headset. Emulates 7.1 surround sound, best headset I've ever owned. You can truly tell when people are sneaking up on you, or if there's a bad guy on the other side of the wall.

I want to clarify something about "7.1" or "5.1" headphones versus simple stereo earphones with binaural spatialization, or head-related transfer functions (HRTF).

A 7.1 headphone is receiving a 7.1 (say, Dolby) encoded signal. I've seen some headphones which then use multiple speakers(!) per ear in an effort to reproduce this. I'm guessing most use a very tuned variation of HRTFs which are hardcoded to translate the 7.1 source into a fuzzy spatial approximation.

Now, let's look at the "pathway of sound localization" for such a setup...

• Game has a mono sound-source located at some x,y,z relative to player.


• Sound is mixed to the 7.1 channels...



-so something directly in front would mostly present its high frequencies on the front channel, while lower frequencies might spread a bit to other channels, with very low on the LFE
-the speakers give you a crude circle to interpolate around, notably lacking toward the rear, but our directional sense is worse there anyway.



• Now in the headphones, we try to emulate the idealized 7.1 speaker setup...



-if the headphones aren't trying to use multiple directional speakers per ear, it's going to use hardcoded HRTFs which behave as if there are 7 virtual sound-sources around you.

To me, as someone wanting to present a sound source from location x,y,z... this is a *catastrophe*. Or a bad joke. Yes, it works, to some degree. But it's so complicated and suffers serious and unnecessary information loss. Locating sounds is very inaccurate, but enough to know crudely what direction (I challenge you to a virtual Jedi test! :P). You also throw away the vertical component. This will be even *more* important in a virtual environment where your head is tilting all over! Peek around a corner and where are those sounds coming from? I'm sure people will *not* tilt the virtual listener for audio encoding if they're using a 7.1 encoding because tilting will become confusing rather than enhancing as it should.

HRTFs: For those unfamiliar with them, here's the genesis of the idea: if you record from *in your ears* and play the recording back *in your ears*, you retain spacial cues. All the tiny distortions to sound which hint to our brain where the sound was coming from. This is largely a matter of reflections off our gnarly earlobes.

Now to be able to map a virtually-positioned mono sound to the stereo earphones is a little tricker, but directly uses this technique. You record sound-pulses (delta function) from a sphere of locations around a listener with in-ear microphones. These pulses provide all frequencies from high to low... so what you record is the <frequency-response function for each ear from a source at that location>. Then you can use the magic of math (the operation is called convolution and it's really no more complex than a matrix multiply) to filter a given sound (frequencies with varying amplitude) with a given frequency-response function -- imparting the same cues as the sound would have had if it was played at that location. This is like having hundreds of virtual speakers arrayed around you, and skipping the step of lossy "surround" encoding.

We can't all have an anechoic sound chamber and nice in-ear microphones. But there are huge datasets from different subjects (and average-human mannequins) of these HRTFs. All we need to do is play sounds through some system that supports them. Back in the mid 90's when this stuff was pretty fresh... we were awaiting special hardware to convolve multiple simultaneous sound sources with HRTFs, because just a few sources would eat up your CPU, at low quality.

Nowadays we happily do expensive Dolby encoding... and then wear headphones to try to undo the encoding. Seems crazy to me. :P

I use the RAZER CHIMAERA 5.1 http://www.razerzone.com/ca-en/gaming-audio/razer-chimaera-51 and I find it to work just fine. Going wireless I think would be a good choice if you want to use the rift without having cables all over the place.

"wblanchette" wrote:

Also, hello there fellow Calgarians! Who wants to share their Rift with me and ease the pain of waiting? There's beer in it for you!

I'd take you up on that offer but I too impatiently await my rift.

I actually bought these Rosewill true 5.1 headphones (multiple drivers per ear) and I actually found the virtual "7.1" sound on the Corsairs to be superior.

This is great. I feel like I'm just about ready to make a purchase. Thanks!

Hey,

Just made an account to respond to this. I'm a big head-fi fan/audiophile, and have easily spent about $4000 on headphones in the past year. I've tried at least 100 nice audiophile brand closed and open headphones. I think two of the things that you are looking for are mutually exclusive.

If you want truly realistic audio, you have to go for an open headphone design. Open headphones have a magically wide soundstage, making it sound like the audio is actually coming from the room and not from headphones. The first time I popped on a pair, I thought I hadn't plugged it into my laptop properly, and it was playing from outside speakers.

This will come at the expense of sound isolation. They will have very little isolation. If you're in a quiet room though, it will be way better. My recommendation for a cheapish, but still nice open headphone would be the Sennheiser HD555/558/595/598 (all really similar). These are just standard stereo headphones, but if you have a binural source of audio, it'll sound more realistic than a nice 5.1 system.

If you need isolation, then you should go closed, but you will lose the realistic sound. It will instead sound like it's coming from headphones, even if you get really nice ones. Comfort wise, molded IEMs would be the best, but they are also closed and can be pricey!

Hopefully this didn't just confuse you more. Many games don't do binaural audio well, so you'd be forced to use Dolby Headphone/CMSS3D or buy a cheaper "5.1" headphone.

The world of headphones/audio is very complicated!

Thanks, cegli! Much appreciated. Especially so because there's another thread here (I think it's Nihilian's thread for his idea for a psychedelic experience via Rift) makes mention of binaural audio quite prominently. I'll be sure to pass this along.

Again, really appreciate it.

particularly good at both shutting out the outside world and provide great positional sound?

In ear monitors definitely have the edge on these two fronts, IMO. I recently got a pair of Etymotic HF5's (http://www.headphone.com/headphones/etymotic-hf5.php) with VR in mind, and I love them to death. I got them for $100 on amazon, which is an amazing value to me. It's my second pair of etymotic earphones (for good reason), and they really deliver on both of the qualities you mentioned. <3 etymotic

They fit like earplugs, and almost completely silence the outside world. If you think of how isolating the rift is visually, these would pretty much be the audio equivalent (true for other in-ear headphones too). They're quite flat, and great for accurate reproduction (of positional audio cues). They're definitely my preferred choice for immersive audio. I'm always a bit surprised by how loud my quiet room sounds after I take them out.

I got a pack of extra eartips so that I can use them for rift demos with close friends. For everyone else, I'll probably stick to over-ear headphones due to sanitation issues.