I bought a Razer Tiamat a couple years ago (a true 7.1 surround sound headset) and it was one of the best purchases I've ever made. Imagine living your life with one eye closed, then suddenly having the opportunity to open both eyes, and how surprising it would be to realize that you have depth perception, etc. That's sort of what experiencing true surround sound is like.
It requires a bit of tweaking to get configured properly though, which led to a lot of negative reviews or people leaving reviews saying they weren't impressed.
Experiencing actual 7.1 surround sound headphones (rather than simulated surround) is kind of like a mini version of experiencing the Oculus Rift for the first time, in terms of the "wow" factor when you finally get it working properly. What Rift is to eyes, the Tiamat is to ears.
The reason headphones have had just two speakers till now is because people have two ears, so we've incorrectly assumed that that's all that's needed. But human ears are designed to capture 3D positional audio. Two speakers means there are only two positions that audio can come from. 7.1 headphones simply blow everything else out of the water. It's a very visceral experience that's hard to articulate.
The takeaway is that having a headset which is capable of physically producing soundwaves from 7 different directions at once is one of the coolest experiences that any gamer can have. For casual gamers, it enhances the experience and immersion of any game. For competitive gamers, you can hear people sneaking up behind you, so you gain a competitive advantage.
All of this means that real (not simulated) 7.1 surround sound is a valuable idea which till now has seemingly been overlooked by the gaming industry. The first industry player that delivers a true positional surround sound experience to the masses stands to profit handsomely, whether it's Oculus or Sony or someone else. So build it!
(That said, I have no idea what 60 virtual speakers means, but I wanted to share my experience with true positional surround sound. Also, the surround sound headset works fine in tandem with the Rift. So until the Oculus guys realize how important 3D positional audio is and ship their next product with a pair of surround sound headphones, you can get the same effect right now from the Tiamat.)
> The takeaway is that having a headset which is capable of physically producing soundwaves from 7 different directions at once is one of the coolest experiences that any gamer can have.
I'm pretty skeptical as to whether this really requires special headphones. Amazing-sounding recordings made with a binaural head can be played back on normal headphones, after all. It seems more like a signal processing problem.
Sort of analogous to the way Creative used to sell overwrought, overpriced hardware for creating sound effects with EAX when the CPU and signal-processing libraries could have been used to serve the same purposes.
a recording from a binaural head cannot account for the different shapes of pinnae that humans have. The outer ear of humans are shaped quite differently. So each ear has his own transfer function which not only depends on frequency but also on the direction of the sound.
I don't know: the stuff I remember hearing was pretty amazing and there wasn't an ear measurement step in the listening process. If what you say is correct I wonder how perfect the match has to be in practice. (but, to the point regarding the magic headphones: this is something that could happen in the software if you're simulating the whole thing)
At least EAX was DSP accelerated, which meant no latency. I used to use my Soundblaster Live as a guitar effects pedal. Doing effects processing on the CPU was entirely feasible with the hardware, but the stock Windows drivers added about 2 seconds of latency to the input - useless for jamming. So I'd just plug my guitar into Line in, go to settings, and play with different EAX environments. Eventually I found the kX Project which provides non-sucky drivers for EMU10K1 cards, but I remember how awed I was when I first installed Linux and found that Linux soundcard drivers were non-sucky by default. I think that was formative...
Not the parent, but I had no idea that existed myself. What's the actual cause if vision in either eye works fine otherwise? The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoblindness) wasn't too helpful.
For me, my eyes were slightly crossed as a kid. Had a couple of eye surgeries to align my eyes correctly, but the pupils were not aligned vertically perfectly, causing slightly conflicting images from each eye, and thus causing the brain to use the image from one of the eyes as opposed to fusing the two images as those with stereo-vision do. Both eyes still work all the time, the non-dominant eye at any given time just provides peripheral vision.
I don't remember the source, read this over six years ago, but there was a case where a women born with stereo blindness just suddenly regained depth perception.
> Imagine living your life with one eye closed, then suddenly having the opportunity to open both eyes, and how surprising it would be to realize that you have depth perception, etc.
Interestingly, some people with faulty depth perception have had that experience with Oculus Rift. I look forward to trying it out myself.
It requires a bit of tweaking to get configured properly though, which led to a lot of negative reviews or people leaving reviews saying they weren't impressed.
Experiencing actual 7.1 surround sound headphones (rather than simulated surround) is kind of like a mini version of experiencing the Oculus Rift for the first time, in terms of the "wow" factor when you finally get it working properly. What Rift is to eyes, the Tiamat is to ears.
The reason headphones have had just two speakers till now is because people have two ears, so we've incorrectly assumed that that's all that's needed. But human ears are designed to capture 3D positional audio. Two speakers means there are only two positions that audio can come from. 7.1 headphones simply blow everything else out of the water. It's a very visceral experience that's hard to articulate.
The takeaway is that having a headset which is capable of physically producing soundwaves from 7 different directions at once is one of the coolest experiences that any gamer can have. For casual gamers, it enhances the experience and immersion of any game. For competitive gamers, you can hear people sneaking up behind you, so you gain a competitive advantage.
All of this means that real (not simulated) 7.1 surround sound is a valuable idea which till now has seemingly been overlooked by the gaming industry. The first industry player that delivers a true positional surround sound experience to the masses stands to profit handsomely, whether it's Oculus or Sony or someone else. So build it!
(That said, I have no idea what 60 virtual speakers means, but I wanted to share my experience with true positional surround sound. Also, the surround sound headset works fine in tandem with the Rift. So until the Oculus guys realize how important 3D positional audio is and ship their next product with a pair of surround sound headphones, you can get the same effect right now from the Tiamat.)