CS Headphone
TV in the palm of your hand—it’s an amazingly convenient way to catch up on your video favorites. But when an audio track has been matrix encoded from five or more tracks down to two, and then the audio track is compressed even further, is it even possible to restore a quality enveloping audio track on headphones?
Yes, of course, if your device has CS Headphone™ from SRS Labs. Based on the science of psychoacoustics and using a suite of SRS technologies, we take the headphone and earbud audio that sounds like it coming from a point inside your head, and expand it out—providing a truly immersive surround sound experience.
This is the smart way to enjoy matrixed multichannel audio with headphones.
Headphones are the ultimate convenience for a personal, private video experience. Whether it’s keeping quiet in a house that’s already gone to bed, or catching up on downloaded episodes on an airplane or commuter train, headphones make enjoying your favorites as easy as convenient can be. But when 5.1 content is matrix encoded for 2-channel transmission and then processed for 2-channel headphones, what happens to the surround sound?
Portable media devices and headphones with CS Headphone are able to take these small but information-dense audio files and restore an immersive surround sound with sophisticated and complex digital processing. Channels are first decoded, then the rear and surround channels are processed separately from front channels. Plus the waveforms are processed further with technologies that improve the clarity of voice and dialog, and boost the perception of bass.
Dialog Clarity. Audio creators today have more sound tools than ever to work with, and more channels to put sound in. So naturally, they create rich, dense audio for any purpose—movies, TV and music. However, with such heavily layered audio tracks, sometimes the vocals and dialog get lost in the shuffle, or buried under sound effects when being processed for two-channel headphone output. Dialog Clarity boosts the frequency range of the human voice in a way that lifts the dialog above the audio effects, so you can hear clearly every word you’re supposed to hear front and center.
Improved Bass. We know small speakers like earbuds and headphones cannot reproduce deep bass. It’s physically impossible. But bass sounds are always accompanied by overtones, and if your ears are given all the overtones, your perception will fill in the ‘missing fundamental.’ CS Headphone provides an amazing combination of psychoacoustic understanding and technical know-how, managing to restore the ‘feel’ of deep bass. SRS technology identifies the signals that cannot be reproduced, and restores and boosts the overtones. It’s like a virtual subwoofer, and it’s courtesy of some sophisticated audio waveform processing. The final restoration is remarkable.
With all this technology, SRS CS Headphone makes private video enjoyment of encoded and compressed audio files better than ever thought possible, and it will make any handheld device sound the best it possibly can.