Stereo signals can be processed for headphones to recreate natural binaural sound fields

Evidence

A concept similar to upmixing, but for headphone playback, involves adaptively processing the frequency bands of a stereo signal to obtain the natural binaural characteristics. Menzer and Faller (2010) and Faller and Breebaart (2011) applied direct-ambience signal analysis to process the ambience signal to match the frequency-band coherence occurring in a diffuse sound field. The direct signal was processed using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), which are free-field transfer functions from a source to both ears, or with binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) (Faller and Breebaart, 2011). The procedure was reported in informal listening to improve the perceived naturalness of the sound over the original stereo (Menzer and Faller, 2010) and to improve the width and accuracy of the sound stage over the conventional methods of binaural processing of stereo sound (Faller and Breebaart, 2011). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2176

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines HRTFs as free-field transfer functions from a source to both ears, and introduces BRIRs as the binaural counterpart.