Do the 5.1 Stereo Headphones Really Work?

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Do the 5.1 Stereo Headphones Really Work?

Posted by Cliff on Monday January 26, 2004 @08:20AM from the living-up-to-the-hype dept.

Tamor asks: "Zalman, the company behind some extremely high quality PC noise-reducing products are now selling real 5.1 surround sound headphones. The surround effect is achieved by placing 3 drivers in each ear-piece. As a geek-with-young-family this product's pushing all the right buttons for me, it looks cool, and means I can finally achieve surround sound without waking the kids. Or does it? I was sure that to place a sound spatially your brain relies on the delay between hearing the sound in one ear and then the other. If your left ear only hears the left 3 channels, and your right ear only hears the right 3 channels isn't this making it more difficult for spatial placement to happen? Do you know if/how these are achieving surround effect if each ear is only hearing half of the audio field?"

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Well calculated delay by forsetti · 2004-01-26 08:33 · Score: 4, Informative

The Headphones are "smart" enough to create an appropriate delay, per channel, to cause that spatial effect you refer to.

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10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
google? by iamjim · 2004-01-26 08:33 · Score: 5, Informative

reviews found at:

bigbrui.com, overclockersclub.com, modthebox.com, pcextreme.net, Tom's Hardware, AnandTech.com, etc...
Read CPU magazine for a review by phoenix_rizzen · 2004-01-26 08:35 · Score: 4, Informative

This month's CPU magazine has a review of these headphones. Don't recall the specifics, but they received a good review. The reviewer found them to be much better than stereo headphones during gaming sessions as you could hear sounds from all directions. But the sound quality for DVD movie playback wasn't so hot.

There might be a copy of the review on their website (no I don't have a URL, use a search engine).
Not to be snarky: by attaboy · 2004-01-26 08:42 · Score: 5, Informative

But the Zalman product page that you linked to in your post had links to several online reviews. Were those insufficient? I found them to give me all the information that I would need to make a $40 purchase...
www.rbmods.com
www.hardextreme.org

http://www.fastlanehw.com
www.itpro.no

www.hardware-testdk.com

ohls-place.com

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The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
For the smart-asses, the answer by Tamor · 2004-01-26 18:56 · Score: 4, Informative

I found out the actual answer to my question, and no it isn't on Zalman's site or in the reviews, and yes I expect that they did think about this before putting a product out. The answer is that the pinna (the outer part of the ear) catches the sound and funnels it down to the ear-drum. The folds and curves of the pinna alter the waveform of the sound as its funneled, and this happens in different ways depending on the direction in which the sound enters the pinna. The brain picks up those differences and is able to tell whether a sound originated in front, behind, above, below etc. So that's how you're able to spatially place a sound you can only hear in one ear. Neat.