NicolasB
03-10-2002, 1:46 PM
So: I'm in the market for a home cinema sound system. Started off a while back with the idea of spending £2500 or so - Toshiba 510, Denon 3802, Acoustic Energy Aegis Evo 3B, something like that. Have been ratcheting up my budget ever since. After not liking anything cheaper I now find myself considering a system in the £15000 bracket - perhaps Arcam FMJ DV27 / AV8 / P7 into B&W Nautilus 803/HTM1/SCM1/M&K MX700.
While comments on the latter system and alternatives are welcome, I can't really afford £15000, so I'm exploring alternatives. And one that occurred to me is: what about headphones?
The other day (at a point when my price-level was about £8000) I was listening to a Denon AVC-A1SR, hooked up to some B&W Nautilus 805/HTM2/CDM SNT speakers. Now the Denon amp has Dolby Headphone processing ability, so I tried attaching my faithful Sennhesier HD600 headphones - and the effect was really quite remarkable.
As I'm sure you know, the Dolby Headphone algorithm models the user sitting at the sweet spot of a 5.1 speaker system. It calculates not only direct sound but also wall reflections, and then does HRTF calculations. The end result is that you get surround information through the headphones.
The positional information you got wasn't as impressive as I got from the speakers. You could tell easily when a sound was rushing from left to right, or from front to back, but you'd have had to think about it to locate a single static sound. But the clarity of it, the ability to resolve every sound individually, to be able to analyse not just what people were saying but what their accents were: that was really very impressive. MUCH better than the speaker system.
So here we have some £120 headphones seriously challenging £4000 of speakers with some power-amplification on top.
So that brings me to my question: does there exist any kind of stand-alone device that can take a 5.1 input (either as a digital stream or as 6 pre-decoded analogue signals), perform something like a Dolby Headphone calculation on it, and output it as two line-level analogue channels that can then be fed into a decent headphone amp?
So far the closest I've found to this is the Pioneer SE-DIR1000C. But, quite aside from the fact that it's only sold in Japan, this has an integral wireless headphone setup which is of no interest to me. There is also a processor product from AKG, the Hearo 999 Audiosphere digital processor which sounds somewhat similar, although it's difficult to figure out from their website whether this actually does what I want or not.
Can anyone suggest a product that meets my needs? Failing that, can anyone suggest a place where I could get such a thing built reasonably cheaply as a piece of bespoke hardware?
While comments on the latter system and alternatives are welcome, I can't really afford £15000, so I'm exploring alternatives. And one that occurred to me is: what about headphones?
The other day (at a point when my price-level was about £8000) I was listening to a Denon AVC-A1SR, hooked up to some B&W Nautilus 805/HTM2/CDM SNT speakers. Now the Denon amp has Dolby Headphone processing ability, so I tried attaching my faithful Sennhesier HD600 headphones - and the effect was really quite remarkable.
As I'm sure you know, the Dolby Headphone algorithm models the user sitting at the sweet spot of a 5.1 speaker system. It calculates not only direct sound but also wall reflections, and then does HRTF calculations. The end result is that you get surround information through the headphones.
The positional information you got wasn't as impressive as I got from the speakers. You could tell easily when a sound was rushing from left to right, or from front to back, but you'd have had to think about it to locate a single static sound. But the clarity of it, the ability to resolve every sound individually, to be able to analyse not just what people were saying but what their accents were: that was really very impressive. MUCH better than the speaker system.
So here we have some £120 headphones seriously challenging £4000 of speakers with some power-amplification on top.
So that brings me to my question: does there exist any kind of stand-alone device that can take a 5.1 input (either as a digital stream or as 6 pre-decoded analogue signals), perform something like a Dolby Headphone calculation on it, and output it as two line-level analogue channels that can then be fed into a decent headphone amp?
So far the closest I've found to this is the Pioneer SE-DIR1000C. But, quite aside from the fact that it's only sold in Japan, this has an integral wireless headphone setup which is of no interest to me. There is also a processor product from AKG, the Hearo 999 Audiosphere digital processor which sounds somewhat similar, although it's difficult to figure out from their website whether this actually does what I want or not.
Can anyone suggest a product that meets my needs? Failing that, can anyone suggest a place where I could get such a thing built reasonably cheaply as a piece of bespoke hardware?