Surprising to me, most people haven’t even heard of the best audio presentation format available. “Bi-what?” they ask me. But binaural sound has been in existence for over 100 years, longer even than stereo. So what exactly is binaural?
It’s really simple, actually. Binaural (“by-nor'-all”) is the same logical format as stereo (left, right) with the functionality of surround sound in 3-D. This is all done by acoustics, so the format can be digital or analog, broadcast, closed circuit, or recording, and the spacial information is retained. It can be recorded on tape, record, CD, SACD, DVD, MP3, you name it.
Binaural sounds just like live, in-person when listened to with headphones. You hear sounds in front, behind, up, down, left, right, and everywhere in between. No decoding necessary. And it sounds just like surround on a surround decorder. How did they do that? How did they get vertical, horizontal, and front-to-back all in only two channels?
The answer lies in where they placed the microphones. To record or broadcast in binaural, you have to put the microphones the same distance apart as human ears: approximately 7 inches, and back-to-back. For best results, in most cases a dummy head or actual human head is used (the technician’s own head, for example), with the microphones placed just inside the outer ear. This acoustically processes the audio before it reaches the microphones, so when it is played back, the brain interprets the position, distance, size, and shape of the object creating the noise (an instrument, for example).
Surround sound is good, but binaural is better. For further information or to order binaural recordings, visit John Sunier at the Binaural Source.
No comments:
Post a Comment