I enjoy how “spatial audio” makes it sound all fancy, even though it’s just stupid stereo.
It’s not, I assure you. It uses psychoacoustic properties of audio to simulate actual surround sound. I’ve been using it in gaming for years. You can literally hear when an enemy is behind you vs in front of you, and anywhere in the 360° around you. You can easily pinpoint their location in your head.
Pixel Buds Pro have this same kind of programming and you can enable it when watching surround sound content on your phone. You can even have it play regular audio but make it sound like it’s coming from the direction of the phone. When you turn your head, the audio follows the phone and it sounds like the audio is coming from the phone in 3D, not just panned L or R in stereo. (I haven’t played with this much, and I hope I’m not misremembering that last part which iPhone also has.)
Here’s a computer generated example using these techniques. Headphones are required! Listen to this with ordinary headphones with no additional spatial processing enabled.
To my ears, it sounds like the 3 channels of the source audio are little spheres rotating around the top of my head like a halo. The music sounds distinctly different when it’s behind me or in front of me. The distance away from my head is not far, though.
A technique like this will never be perfect, and this is not the best example I’ve heard. The best would be using my Logitech gaming headset in a game. It’s not perfect because everyone’s ears are shaped differently, and your brain learns the microtonal differences which your specific ears cause as sound echo’s around your outer ear and ear canal. This might be why I hear these music examples as above my head while others might hear it revolve directly around their ears or perhaps a little lower than their ears.
I enjoy how ignorant people who don’t understand a technology dismiss is with snark and get upvoted by others. Wait, what’s the opposite of enjoy?
It’s like how religious fundies with little education make fun of our best scientific theories with arguments that boil down to “I’m ignorant, so I don’t believe this”. Congratulations on being on the same level.
Nah, I’m not ignorant, just cynical.
I make digital music myself. I’ve had that moment myself, where for a quick moment I thought, surely there could be some ‘proper’ way of rotating an audio source around your head.
And well, there is not, it is always just an effect thing.
As in, even in reality, our hearing is literally stereo, because we’ve got precisely two eardrums, two membranes that do the detection. Yes, the ear flaps shape the sound, but you can do the same shaping with just effects. Make it a bit more muffled when it comes from behind, for example, and hope you don’t need to also portray that something muffled comes from the front. And of course, always slap a heavy virtualizer effect on there.
In the end, it’s smokes and mirrors that our brain then interprets as something spatial. I don’t have a problem with smokes and mirrors. I do still find it humorous, though.
I don’t really follow your logic, how else would you propose to shape the audio that is not “just an effect”.
Your analogy to real life does not take into account that the audio source itself is moving, so their is an extra variable outside of just stereo signal -which is what spatial audio is modelling
And your muffling example sounds a bit over simplified maybe? My understanding is that the spatial stuff is produced by phase shifting the LR signals slightly
Finally why not go further? “I don’t listen to speaker audio because it’s all just effects and mirages to sound like a real sound, what only 2^16 discrete positions the diaphragm can be in” :p
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/LpMsqFc7-Z4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I got some AirBuds Proz and was blown the fuck away listening to music with Spatial Audio. I would love to try using them for games, but I’m sure they work like garbage on my Windows machines. Still, VERY cool tech.
They will just be normal earbuds on Windows, just like my Pixel Buds Pro. Even worse because I have to “forget” then rconnect the Buds from scratch every time I boot my PC. They will always say “connected” with no actual way to switch to them.
I listened to you link after commenting and it is absolutely an accurate representation of basic Spatial Audio for normal headphones! Thank you for sharing. I went through with Spatial Audio off and it astounded me, then was surprised when Spatial Audio ON made it less impressive. It’s because on Apple devices, it has the sound come more from where the video is coming from. For regular music, it doesn’t do that.
You’re not supposed to listen to pre-procrssed audio like that with additional spatial audio processing. You’re supposed to listen with ordinary headphones.
Useless.
Incorrect. This will better train LLMs since they can detect distinct speakers/sounds more easily and thus applying the proper metadata tags and profile information at a more accurate clip.
All so they can deliver more ads!
oh look, a feature literally no one asked for or needs.
90% of the features in your daily life started as something no one asked for or needed. I remember people saying this about touch screens.
Was anyone asking for the telegraph before it was invented? Or the telephone? Or the Internet? Or smartphones? Or social media?
In some applications, people still say that about touch screens and they are not wrong.
Spatial Audio can be cool. In this application? I’m unconvinced.
I don’t necessarily endorse the viewpoint of Noel Gallagher but it is pretty funny.
I don’t care about Spatial Audio for phone calls, but for songs and podcasts it’s AMAZING. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it’s really fucking neat.
I agree with you fully, but Spatial Audio is waaaay cooler than 3D TVs, and yes I did watch Avatar on a 3D TV on acid
But I really really have fun with audio. Also it’s not horridly expensive. While I’m working, I’m constantly looking around and hearing how different things are. When I had my partner try, they were like “wait can you hear this?” because it sounds like such a realistic concert performance. Artists I’ve never listened to are fascinating to me.
If it improves video calls and regular calls, why not? I can definitely see room for improvement in audio quality when calling and would be happy to have a better experience.
Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn’t. Not saying it’s a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn’t going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.
At least in the United States, when you call somebody on the same carrier as you, you get that HD quality thing, and that improves the call quality a bunch versus the standard 8KB phone call. However, even still, when you call somebody on another carrier, you generally don’t get that high quality call. So it would be nice to get those high quality calls between carriers for everybody before moving on.
Voice over LTE and high definition calling is actually not the same thing. You can have a voice over LTE call and not have the high quality audio calling. All Voice over LTE actually does is make your call into packets between you and your providers network instead of setting up a circuit like they used to.
Nokia implemented stereo sound? Wow, welcome to 1881.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it’ll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you’re not holding it next to one ear, they’re still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
This was true for TVs until it wasn’t.
Edit: apparently some young whippersnappers don’t know TVs used to be mono before they were stereo, and now some TVs even have spatial sound.
i mean, people have innovated in the areas they care already.
no one really cares that much about audio on phone calls. as long as they’re understandable.
people added video because it adds to the communication. spatial audio will not. it will only become common if one or two of these mega corps decide to shoehorn it into ever device. not because people actually want it or care.
might be a lucrative patent if we ever get holograms though
i mean, people have innovated in the areas they care already
so you are saying that all the innovation and research should be stopped, because if we care about any specific problem, it is already solved, and if it isn’t, it is proof we don’t care? 😆
that… is not how it works.
… You realize this has been innovated because someone cares, right?
Like this is such a silly argument. “Why would we make cars not use steam? If people cared about it we would have already innovated!”
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it’ll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you’re not holding it next to one ear, they’re still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
No, lots of (probably most) phones and other devices has stereo speakers.
Either way headphones are most often used for this (you know like the thumbnail)
