DTS Headphone X - Home Theater in Pocket - Page 2

Now the question is who will implement this first my bets are on ONKYO :)

Yeah, if this got into mainstream mobile devices, where, like it or not, most music consumers listen, there could finally be a delivery platform to spur mainsteam multichannel music production - huzzah!

The DTS web site mentioned above says:

"The DTS Headphone:X experience first requires surround content to be encoded as a DTS-HD bitstream, with the room information embedded in the stream."

So it is a specific codec that needs to be supported in hardware, firmware, or software. Both when it is encoded and played back.

I have had a Beyerdynamic Headzone 5.1 unit for several years that processes DTS, Dolby Digital, and DD Pro-logic into a virtual 5.1 environment for headphones. It does that pretty well. DTS is the best quality.

Likely the h/w to support Headphone:X will have some sort of "emulation mode" to fall back to if the room information is not encoded. Few movies have the attention to sound design that would warrant this next step. As an amateur recording engineer I c

how I see it:

Headphone X is a software encoder that encodes DTS-HD to 2 channels. It uses the room information to do this, as well as the actual sound in each track.

How does it do this? The same way our ears change a sound that is behind us to one that is in front. The tone changes based on how much ear flesh the sound waves have to pass through. So if a sound is identical through front left and then rear left, to mimic this in 2-channel headphones the rear left sound is played slightly muffled. The headphoneX also adds in room reflections to mimic a room, though to me this seems odd as speakers have always tried to sound like they aren't in a room.

It looks like to me a concept somewhat more advanced than Dolby Headphone with calculating in headphone position , but with a lot less potential than if it was based on object based audio formats like Dolby Atmos and SRS MDA.
Edited by avada - 3/20/13 at 12:58am

I agree, Headphone:X is far superior to Dolby Headphone.