Binaural DSP Welcome Post: Sharing Survey Results, Addressing Music Lovers and The Hi-Fi Audience and Building A Community For Binaural
Part 1: Survey Results
Greetings everyone! Binaural DSP is a spatial audio start-up that just conducted blind AB surveys comparing Binaural to Stereo. Seeing that 68% of participants enjoyed listening to Binaural over conventional stereo, I am pretty sure most of you guessed that version B was in Binaural while version A was in conventional stereo.
Survey Results: Binaural DSP Survey Results.jpg - Google Drive
Part 2: What Is Binaural DSP?
The word Binaural means to hear with both ears. Binaural DSP is a DSP method of using information from both ears to locate sound in a physical space. Headphones isolate the left and right ear from each other, as news from the right headphone channel is not heard in the left headphone channel as it would be in a natural physical environment. Binaural DSP uses left and right channel information to listen to things Spatially, just as we do in a physical space. In the world of psychoacoustics, very short delays between the left and right ear that are fractions of a second long are used to locate the spatial orientation of the sound The greater the delay, the farther to the right or left the sound is. The smaller the delay, the closer to the center the sound is. The delayed signal is more than often low pass filtered by the head, which is also taken into account in the DSP algorithm. Some key features of Binaural DSP are a low passed volume-dependent delay channel, logarithmic sample-based stereo expansion, cross-talk phase cancellation (for speakers), and an eight-by-eight channel re-routing matrix, sometimes known as up-mixing. Binaural DSP uses a combination of DSP concepts, some of which are not listed, to create an immersive experience.
Part 3: Building A Community
The last 1-2 years have been spent working on this project. Binaural DSP was a way of renewing my interest in music and reconnecting to music from my favorite artists. Please leave song requests in the comment section, and I will convert them into Binaural. I am passionate about sharing this experience with others. It has changed my perspective and enjoyment of music in ways I never expected, and a community around Binaural would be all about the experience.
Part 4: Customizable Spatial Audio with Binaural DSP Great news! Binaural DSP is a customizable spatial audio format, and in the next few years, it will bring customizable spatial audio features to music listeners. I am willing to customize music requests from individual users interested in hearing the complete customizability of the format, giving feedback, and becoming reinvested in music in new yet still familiar ways.
Feedback 1: “As for the sound clips, what did you do to make them sound so good in the B examples? After the study, I played Warriyo - Mortals from Soundcloud and demoed it against the versions I got from you. The Soundcloud version sounds no different than your A version, but your B version sounds immensely better, with crispness and clarity that gives the song far more depth than it originally had. Even the game demo had strikingly more detail. I wouldn’t mind running a few of my sound sources through whatever DSP you use if it’s available.”
Feedback 2: "The version B recordings had more a sensation of being there, with the 180 degree sound stage continuing inside, through my head, from ear to ear and much better than version A’s distant, central image sound.
Version B had a sensation of involvement, being surrounded by, and part of the music.
With Warhaven version A, the narration and effects were very distant, and un-defined. But with version B, the battle sprung to life each time, the sounds being much more ‘close quarter’ combat, the soundstage was more 3-dimensional, once again being present inside my head, as well as alongside me."
Keeping Binaural DSP Free: This is all for free for now, which can allow people to fully understand and experience Binaural before it is officially released. Binaural will be launched alongside a website with a built-in file converter and customizable features within the following year.
That’s everything! Feel free to share the effect with others, whether it be on headphones or speakers. Binaural DSP offers an experience of music worth sharing! I think this is a pretty big win for the world of music and spatial audio! Attached below are the full songs used in the survey.
Binaural DSP Survey Music Link: Binaural DSP Survey Music Full Versions - Google Drive
Please engage in the Binaural DSP reddit to make song requests or to voice your own feedback and comments on the audio project: