1) 5.1/7.1 verses stereo: i have 3 phones i'm testing - 1 stereo, 1 multi-driver 7.1, 1, duel driver virtual surround -- the multi-driver surround

2) stereo surround: this is related to my 1st Q -- is it truly possible to accurately determine the position of a sound within the soundscape with stereo with regard to front/rear?

4) if a listening device is plugged into USB, is the internal sound card completely bypassed?

Quote from: mzil on 2015-07-24 17:59:34

How do you know these technologies only use EQ for the HRTF effects, though?

Anyone tried the very odd-looking Sennheiser Surrounder?  Yes, it will make you look like the villain's chief henchman from a cheap Sci-Fi movie, but does it work well?

Some of the dumb companies, Dolby would be an example, instead of just altering the EQ they add silly reverberation patterns to mimic how sound echoes in a reverberant chamber, such as a room. But how exactly do they know what kind of room, or its size, the music or movie scene was recorded in? They don't.

In the Star Wars scene when C3PO turns to converse with R2D2, as they walk across the dessert of Tatooine, why exactly should there be any reverberation pattern applied to his voice!? Deserts have no echoes/reverberation and any system which artificially inserts some arbitrary echoes/reverb is just plain dumb, as far as I'm concerned. The goal is to reproduce the sound as if one were there in the desert, live, listening directly to C3PO speak (virtual reality they call it), not what he would sound like if recorded and then later played back through speakers in a tiled bathroom, an auditorium, or any other room for that matter.

Lucas didn't intend for me to hear what C3PO sounds like in a cathedral, a gymnasium, or any other reverberant enclosed space for that matter for that scene.

But what you are proposing cannot be achieved in the vast majority of non THX theaters, let alone in people's regular rooms, with a multichannel speaker system, so this criticism doesn't apply exclusively to Dolby's and others' methods of headphone virtualization. (Dolby can also virtualize drier rooms.) It's a separate issue.

But what you are proposing cannot be achieved in the vast majority of non THX theaters, let alone in people's regular rooms,

How do you know these technologies only use EQ for the HRTF effects, though?

DH uses room modeling to provide the out-of-head effect. It affects not only the sense of depth but also the angular directions particularly for the L/R channels. If you have a DH product, you may have seen the options for DH1, 2, and 3 (not all products offer them, though). Those are different room models.

Upon first hearing a prototype of the headphone system, Ray Dolby said it sounded like a bathroom. Needless to say, the reverb was toned down.