I understand how Dolby Atmos works on 5.1 and 7.1 systems, but wouldn’t translating it to headphones just make it standard stereo? Headphones only have two speakers, one on the left and one on the right.
Even without head tracking like Apple’s spatial audio, why does surround still sound different from stereo?
In: Technology
No matter how many speakers you’re working with, you only have two eardrums. Your actual sense of hearing is stereo, and the “surround-ness” is post-processing applied by your brain.
The basic gist is that your brain uses the delay between a sound being heard by one ear or the other to determine left-right placement of the source, and whether or not it’s muffled by the flesh of your ear to determine front-back.
Virtual surround sound processing just modifies the sound in approximately the way your brain expects it to be modified, and then pumps that directly into your ear.
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