Surround headphones can save your relationship – for instance, to your neighbours because there aren’t any thundering sound effects penetrating through your ceiling and walls anymore. Or to the woman designer who always found five loudspeakers along with a subwoofer in the living room a little bit more than she could stand. Up to now, spatiality has hardly been the unique selling point of headphone models. But now, the Heilbronn-based audio specialist beyerdynamic has come up with an entirely new type of space sound headphones.
The foremost feature of the Headzone® system is its patented Headtracking function that reacts to the listener’s head movements and automatically adapts the space impression on a real-time basis. That’s why the voices of actors the viewer sees on the screen are also in front when the viewer turns his or her head to the side. Normal headphones move the sources of sound along with you, which keeps you from having a natural surround feeling – the sound pattern seems less credible than with a real 5.1 loudspeaker set. But, that’s not the way it is with the Headzone® system from beyerdynamic: thanks to its Headtracking system, the invisible loudspeakers stay where they belong.
The painstaking signal processing not only gives you perfect left/right and front/rear positioning, it makes the cinema enthusiast hear unparalleled space no matter how poor the acoustic conditions may be in your home. Even music programmes in HiFi Stereo profit from our elaborate Room Modelling: the headphones form the typical stereo triangle so that even the Hifi enthusiast gets his or her money’s worth. beyerdynamic consciously decided against radio interfacing because that will never be able to transmit the full dynamics of a digital music signal. You’ve still got volume control on the five meters of headphone, so getting up is superfluous.
The Headzone® system has three components: the processor, headphone and handy Headtracking receiver. The processor is linked by digital cable with a commercially available DVD player or AV receiver and its high-performance signal processors (DSPs) give the same distinct pulse and frequency patterns to the audio signal that the human ear recognises the direction of sound events with in actual space. This technique known as HTRF (head related transfer function) has already proved it worth in the studio: sound engineers all over the world use professional Headzone® systems to control and mix surround productions.
A controller on the headphones enables you to change the size and reflection properties of virtual space. That means that the cinema enthusiast can decide whether he or she would rather enjoy a DVD in the feature film atmosphere or take in the acoustics of a movie theatre. We developed the algorithms needed in painstaking measuring series that are much more intricate and high-performance than the computer processes in the common garden-variety surround headphones or virtual surround switches.
The headphone itself, a special version of the tested beyerdynamic DT 880, is constantly transmitting information on its position by ultrasound to the headtracking receiver. Then, it passes on the data to the processor for analysis where it is made part of the current calculation. The outcome is a stable and absolutely astounding space sound that makes you immediately forget that you’re wearing headphones at all. With the Headzone® system, sound aficionados have all of the benefits of a large-scale home cinema system exceptionally tuned to the space without any of the downsides. There aren’t any bulky loudspeakers in your living room, no complicated wiring and no angry neighbours – just awesome and completely natural surround sound.
MSRP Headzone®-System 2490,- €
without Headtracking 1890,- €
(available from November 2007)
