A fascinating headphone experience?

[Guest]

My question is about the listening experience provided by the combination of headphones, ears and brains.

In another thread we stumbled across the intriguing fact that some of us hear completely different things. Using this ‘Aquapump’ recording http://www.dallassimpson.com/cdReleases.cfm for comparison purposes, we established that some of us experience headphone sound as almost a one dimensional thing with sound appearing to emanate from inside our skull, yet some experienced it as “as an immersive three dimensional thing”.

We can speculate that our very different experiences of the same recording are due to the structure of our ears, skulls, brain functions, etc or perhaps we are simply using the wrong headphones. If you find that different headphones influence the ‘3D’ experience, it would be useful to make that clear.

What I am interested to find out is…. What do other people hear? How do you hear it? Is it really 3D with left/right, up/down, front/back and distance cues or is it just vaguely 'spacious? Some of us may be missing out on what sounds like a fascinating illusion.

[Resurrection Man]

I think a lot has to do with how it was recorded and the physical location of the microphones. I remember the BBC trialling binaural recording many years ago...specifically designed for headphone listening. AFAIR one was set on an oil rig and I do remember getting very grumpy as there was a knock on the door way over and behind my left shoulder and I thought "Who on earth is that?". No-one. In the recording. Just happened to coincide perfectly with our door.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I like to listen with Sennheiser open-back headphones with loudspeakers in front of me, the two balanced separately. That way, I can appreciate the detail without having the feeling that the sound is emanating from inside my head.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I think a lot has to do with how it was recorded and the physical location of the microphones. I remember the BBC trialling binaural recording many years ago...specifically designed for headphone listening.

They broadcast The Archers in binaural sound for a week.

[Nevalti]

I like to listen with Sennheiser open-back headphones with loudspeakers in front of me, the two balanced separately. That way, I can appreciate the detail without having the feeling that the sound is emanating from inside my head.

My emphasis.

From that, I presume you find headphone sound normally seems to emanate from within your head but what about binaural recordings such as in the link in the 1st post? Does that binaural recording also stay fixed inside your head or is it the true 3D experience that some people describe? If some can hear 3D and some can't - why? Is it simply that their ear positions are different from the microphone positions or is there a lot more to it? Is it brain function? For example, some people struggle to understand the optical illusions that most of us are 'fooled' by and here we are talking about at aural illusion - I think.

This is a very good example of a visual 3D illusion in 2D. http://yoism.reality-movement.org/im...anRotating.gif It is not difficult to imagine that there are aural equivalents.