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#binauralaudio#hrtf#spatialaudio

Virtual Barber Shop (Audio...use headphones, close ur eyes)

LovelyVirus

49K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2021.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

43M views19 years ago4 recommendations

Graphics and audioAudio and DSP

A classic binaural audio demonstration showcases spatial sound localization using stereo headphones.

You'll need headphones for this to work. Make sure there is no noise around, close your eyes, turn the volume up a little bit, hold and press headphone on your ears for better hearing, play it and enjoy this impressive audio work ( illusion ). Not a screamer not a prank! Audio credit: The original audio is created by QSound Lab. I put it into this video and uploaded in 2007 to YouTube. See qsound.com/demos/binaural-audio.htm My coin in Solana chain: pump.fun/coin/kx9BWbyazeSu9U32cAdnRZpQJRcfgYBdcjCQgxJpump

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Frequently cited as the gold standard demonstration of spatial and binaural audio effects.

deleteson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Sony announces Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset coming to PS4”

60 Virtual speakers What does that even mean? It sounds like clever marketing talk. I bet they have just regular stereo and software. Here, take a pair of good stereo headphones and try this 3d demo. And don't forget to close your eyes. Virtual barber shop: link to this video
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obersteinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “24/192 music downloads make no sense”

Here's a classic "OMG I can hear him moving around" recording that works with the cheapest of headphones: link to this video Most of the audio experience quality comes out of the production phase, and artists can put as much or little effort into that as possible and consider several mediums of listening (headphones, TV, surround, concert, vinyl) and make tradeoffs for the medium's particular experience. I don't know about double blind trials but people do tests on their own. It's further complicated though because the hardware you use could be optimized for certain types of music, e.g. have a read through link
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kuschkuon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Daredevil Camera”

> I wonder how much people can see in the dark through listening to sound sources by moving their heads for motion parallax. Listen to this with headphones: link to this video It’s amazing how much you can geolocate just in even a recording.
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aaomidion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Spatial Audio”

Because it adds another dimension to the sound you're experiencing and gives you a whole new appreciation for the medium. This combined with binaural audio should be the future of audio storytelling. Give this a try with any normal headphone: link to this video
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garethadamson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Songs of Diridum: Pushing the Web Audio API to Its Limits”

I like this! A great demo of new standards working in browsers. As far as 3D audio goes it would be amazing to see an example which delayed audio to one ear based on the different distances from each ear to the source of the sound. This example just pans the audio - which is still a great effect, but I remember how much I was wowed by the binaural virtual barbershop1 1: link to this video
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speederon Hacker News • Mentions

On “USB-C and Lightning headphones aren't great news for everyone”

Dedicated soundcard, and drivers with direct access to hardware have nothing to do with audio professionals. It is about processors on the card (that back then had about half of the amount of transistors that the PC main CPU had, so they could pack quite a punch in processing power) that could do realtime audio calculations. I am not talking just about "effects" from the audio professional sense, I am talking about realtime creation of audio according to the scene geometry and stuff happening, for example A3D could calculate actual reflections, not just simulated reverb/echo. If you want to see an example of this in real life: go near a window that has a barrier in front of it of some kind,…
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Stevvoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “MakeSpace – Virtual Spatial Chat”

It's a somewhat limited approach. For more convincing positional audio you can use a HRTF; link Example: link to this video
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The_rationaliston Hacker News • Mentions

On “Surround Sound in Headphones”

It's been 14 years since the last state of the art 3D audio experience: link to this video has anybody done as good since then ? What's this Cetera algorithm ?
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Wowfunhappyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio”

Does anyone happen to know of a non-headphone-specific solution for this, which actually does a good job? It doesn't need to work when I move my head, neither does the Virtual Barbershop1 and yet the effect on my run-of-the-mill earbuds is still incredible. I'm open to little hardware boxes, software that modifies my computer's audio as it plays, a filter for ffmpeg, etc, as long as I can use whatever headphones I want and the spatial effect is high quality. 1: link to this video
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kuschkuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “AirPods Max and AirPods Pro Don't Support Apple Music Lossless, Apple Confirms”

Headphones with a proper HRTF preserve that perfectly fine better than any actual speaker setup ever can. The typical demo for this functionality is link to this video
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mgdlbpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?”

…ince. Is there even spatial audio in VR setups? If the difficulty is in simulating the head/ears, then existing spatial recordings can at least be converted using a binaural microphone in a surround sound setup, no? Though, I guess with headphones any visceral sensation of bass is still lost, so you'd need to keep the subwoofer or a seat shaker. 0 link to this video…
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ceedanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser”

Surround sound was unnecessary. As long as you had stereo headphones you were fine. I had cheap headphones, expensive headphones and even won headphones at LAN events. Directional audio was never an issue on any headset I'd played with. I tested them all with this video - link to this video The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.
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antongribokon Hacker News • Mentions

On “He spent his life building a $1M stereo”

Reading this for some reason reminded me of the Virtual Barber Shop: link to this video (Use headphones and close your eyes.)
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