Headphone
Headphones are convenient, but they completely bypass the outer ear, which brings depth and dimension to sound. Often, audio sounds like it’s coming from inside the listener’s head. This can result in some tired listening.
SRS Headphone™ pulls the sound out of the head, creating a more natural listening experience, and one that’s much closer to a live performance.
Why spatial cues reduce listening fatigue.
Listening to music or any audio live in open air is usually pretty easy on the ears. Unless excessively loud, it’s natural to perceive right and left, near and far, and front or back. The outer ear slightly modifies the amplitude of certain frequencies so you know instinctively where a sound is coming from and how far away it is. Those little changes in amplitude are called spatial cues, and they give us width and depth to sound.
Except when we’re wearing headphones. Left front and right front become far left and far right, which can make for some interesting listening when there’s a lot of distinct stereo separation. But when you have a soundstage filled with a variety of instrumentation that’s supposed to be dispersed wide and in front of you, what you actually hear is a little audio at the far left, some to far right, with all the rest originating inside your head—or at least that’s how it sounds. Helmet-head listening may be ok for a while, but it’s tiring after an extended period. Missing are the spatial cues that tell your ear the precise location of the sound. It’s not just left and right, but also close and far, and it’s the missing dimension in sound.
Based on SRS’s much written about technology SRS 3D®, SRS Headphone restores those mid to high frequency spatial cues that are normally lost in playback processing, making your audio sound wider and deeper. The processing curves are complex, and have as much to do with how people perceive sound as they do with physical playback. But does it ever make stereo a treat to listen to.