Industry Expert Talk: Immersive Audio via Headphones: Status and New Solutions
Currently, nearly all audio productions for movies and music are mastered to both traditional two channel stereo sound and newer multichannel formats. These include Dolby Atmos, MPEG-H/Sony-360 and Eclipsa audio. To listen to these sounds, until now many loudspeakers (e.g., 12 at an 7.1.4 arrangement) are necessary. There has been work on headphone reproduction for immersive audio, but all current software-based systems pale when compared to a loudspeaker-based solution.
The talk will both introduce the basics of spatial audio including standards like MPEG-H, and give details of earlier advancements in headphone-based reproduction over the last 50 years.
The company of the presenter introduced a state-of-the-art headphone-based system in early 2025. This excels in the plausibility of the reproduction of sounds via headphones. It is currently targeted at professional users at mixing studios or post-production facilities as well as at schools educating the next generation of audio engineers. There are already plans for a second generation of these products for users craving the best audio fidelity, who want to have a headphone-based solution.
A multichannel system with the best plausibility should reproduce sound in a room so the listener doesn’t have the feeling of wearing headphones at all. This necessitates the virtual reproduction of sound in a way that it is nearly impossible to distinguish from real sound sources like loudspeakers in the room.
Technically, this process relies on measuring the room’s acoustics so that rendering can be performed using a simplified model of the room. Additionally, fast and accurate 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) head tracking is required, allowing the algorithm to estimate the room’s impulse responses from a virtual sound source to the listener’s headphone position. Thus, the main cues necessary to trick the human brain into perceiving virtual sources as real are reconstructed as needed for a plausible reproduction of sounds via headphones.
