11/29/2023 0 Comments Binaural audio bothers me![]() ![]() However, fools rush in and all that, so I tried to explain in the discussion on the thread what bothered me. ![]() Steven is a friend, so I had thought it wise not to go public about my concerns about VSX. One of my Facebook friends, producer Ryan West, posted similar concerns one Saturday evening about the claims. It’s hard with the constant flurry of claims from all sides, not to get a tad cynical. I’m an old(er) guy and when you’ve spent 40 years in the industry and the last 15 years seeing a lot of new products you get a little jaded. Some people were so excited about them you would have thought that VSX printed money as well as improved the mixing process. I’d seen some of the claims made about them, not all by Steven Slate may I add, and some of them had me raising my eyebrows and biting my tongue. The adverts for the Steven Slate Audio VSX are so ubiquitous you’d be hard pressed not to have seen at least one of them, and this is where this story starts. They make some bold claims about how good the system is, so we put it to the test. It's such a shame that it's been only available on limited devices so far, and hopefully AirPods 3 will change that at a price more people can afford, and will be good enough for a high place in our list of the best wireless earbuds while they're at it.Steven Slate Audio VSX claim in their own words “Perfect mixes, less frustration” amongst other things. With music, it works a bit differently (the sound direction isn't locked to your phone), but you get the same effect of noise being all around you, rather then right in your ears. It's very cool, and really elevates watching movies on a portable devices. If you turn your head 90 degrees to the left while a sound is coming from in front of you, it'll now seem like it's coming from your right. The really clever trick is that if you're watching a movie, the position of these sounds in the 'space' around you is fixed based on where your phone is, because that's the screen you're watching. Or they can come from any other direction, or even overhead. Sounds that would come from in front of you if you were watching the movie in a proper surround sound setup (or a cinema) will seem to come from in front of you. The Spatial Audio feature is designed to take 3D audio formats (ideally Dolby Atmos, which is supported in certain Apple Music songs and by lots of streaming services, but other surround formats will work to) and rather than just pump them into your ears in stereo over the headphones, uses the sensors in AirPods to create the illusion that you're surrounded by speakers. It's long been expected that AirPods 3 would arrive in the second half of the year, likely alongside iPhone 13, and this is just more fuel to the fire. Surely, that is about to change, and while it might be a total coincidence that the world's biggest streaming service is about to support it having not bothered in the past (despite support from rivals including Disney+, HBO Max and Hulu)… I'm thinking that Netflix maybe had a tip-off that the number of people who could use the Spatial Audio feature is about to spike. So Apple is in the process of making Spatial Audio the thing that pushes you to get both its phone and its headphones… but doesn't make any affordable headphones that include the feature.
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