It looks like there's a relatively new piece of software - "
Out of Your Head" - that replicates what the Smyth Realiser does, using a dummy head for the measurements rather than being personalized for you. It uses a virtual audio device for processing, so it will work with Media Center.
InnerFidelity's article posted yesterday is what tipped me off to it.
Current pricing is $99 with $25 for each speaker preset, but there's a trial that lets you use it for about two minutes at a time (changing the preset gives you another two minutes) and
some pre-rendered demos on the website.
I would say that it does a very good job at taking the sound "out of your head" as the name suggests, but for me, I just couldn't find one of the rooms which I liked the sound of enough to use it all the time.
While I won't be buying it, it was a very interesting experience.
I expected to prefer one of the studio presets using Genelecs, but those rooms sounded completely dead and lifeless to me.
It made it clear to me in a way that I hadn't really been aware of before, that the room is
so important to the sound of speakers. Some of the recordings were of speakers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in a 7.1 setup) yet they sounded terrible to me - there's one in particular which had so much reverb it sounded like I was listening in a small tiled bathroom.
Even discounting how the rooms sounded, the other thing which stood out to me is that there were obvious problems at certain frequencies on most of the speaker setups - LFE in particular. The
Focal: Scala Utopian setup was probably my favorite overall, but I still found that highly specific to what was being played, with some tracks not sounding "right" at all.
While software like this which uses a virtual sound device for processing works with Media Center, I'd really like to see support for Dolby Headphone via
dolbyhph.dll, and support for VST plugins which downmix from 5.1/7.1 to a binaural signal.
MC does do downmixing to stereo right. The idea here though is to do a specialized downmix for headphones that creates a binaural 3D style of sound from the multi channel mix. There are VST plugins being created that can do that sort of headphone specific downmixing. It could be the ultimate headphone crossfeed. There's a lot of potential in that idea for very good headphone sound. But you need VST hosts that allow you to use a VST that takes multi channel and outputs stereo.
To be clear, crossfeed and binaural downmixes are very different things.
Media Center offers crossfeed via its "Headphone" DSP, and I use a different VST for crossfeed that I prefer the sound of.
But crossfeed is only a way of making a stereo signal sound more natural on headphones.
When you listen on speakers you hear some of the left channel in your right ear, after a delay and shift in frequency response, and vice-versa.
This is what crossfeed simulates, and it can do a good job making headphone listening sound more natural and less fatiguing - but it only applies to stereo audio.
A binaural downmix takes a multichannel input, does some sophisticated processing, and gives you true positional audio, rather than simply panning the audio left and right as a "standard" downmix to stereo does.
I won't say "3D" positional audio, because 5.1 and 7.1 formats only describe a ring of sound around you on a flat 2D plane, there are no height channels.
With games, where the sound is being rendered in realtime and not limited to 5.1 or 7.1 channels, there are ways of getting true 3D sound with height information when using headphones.
