No, that's not some stock or market principle. I'm a self-admitting audiophile, so I thought it would be appropriate to post about that ... err .. expensive habit now and then.
So I got a Sennheiser HD595, which costs about as much as an iPod nano (maybe one of the reasons why I'm the few people without an iPod?), and it makes seriously good sound, but god! It's in my head! What do I do?
The first solution involved using Creative's CMSS3D and doing some equalization. Hm... that sounds better. The sound's out of my head, and the band is somewhere outside, a few meters behind. Too bad a) I don't have a desktop here anymore, and b) the sound's stuck at the back.
Time to open up foobar2000. First, Dolby Headphones ... hmm, sounds a bit unrealistic, I'll say. But it sounds like CMSS3D, so I guess I'll keep that for now. I'm still sitting with the band behind me ... guess that's a weird listening experience. Then loaded some a weird stereo matrixing plugin that happens to eat up 20% of my CPU ... well, that certainly brought me into the exact center of the band. Great for enviromental and ambience/techno tracks ... not so great for classical and jazz music. So, after a night of research into HRTF's and downloading one, used an impulse convolver (whatever that is) to load that into foobar2000 with the source sent to front and center. Wow! The music actually "somewhat" comes out of the front. It's like my Macbook Pro got some seriously upgraded speakers.
I'll leave the setup like this for now. I know that any form of accurate reproduction has already been thrown out of the window now. But oh well. Be glad I don't work in a studio.
