Binaural recordings

[nieji]

Good Morning!

Any thoughts on binaural recordings?

Thanks,

Ian

[Gordon Steadman]

Good evening:eyebrows:

I remember getting a test disc with a pair of Sennheiser headphones a long time ago.

The narrator tried hard to convince that the listener was enveloped in a natural sound field and that even the sounds behind you were firmly in the aural space.

Like hell they were. There was a nice stereo effect as I recall but I was never convinced it was any advance over good old two channel stereo. So it went the same way as all the other new and improvements. Maybe the techniques have improved.

Good phones though:)

[Barry]

Binaural recordings have to be made with a pair of microphone capsules that are separated by the same distance, and have the same polar response as the human ears (roughly cardoid). Recordings can only be listened to using headphones; replay using speakers will not work owing to speaker crosstalk.

When done properly, binaural recordings can be very realistic - and are potentially capable of better results than the conventional Blumline crossed microphone technique. But you have to listen using headphones, which become uncomfortable after long lisening sessions.

[Mr Kipling]

Have a look on head fi. It's been looked at quite a bit. Have a look on youtube. There's a number of videos. The virtual haircut is pretty good. There's a thread about it here. Do a Google search for binaural and 3D tracks. One that I found was Madcom's version of Beggin' from a few years ago. Another is Maire Brennon's track from Titanic Come Josephine In My Flying Machine. There's some guitar tracks by Dale Inskeep which are quite effective.

[Joe]

The late Lou Reed was always banging on about this. I've got one of his LPs (Street Hassle) recorded in binaural stereo and from memory it sounds just the same as 'ordinary' stereo.

[StanleyB]

If you want to enjoy binaural recordings or at least enjoy the effects of it, you need the right kind of headphones. My Sony MDR-F1, SA-5000, and Sennheiser HD800 are the headphones of choice to me. But the MDR-F1 can make even ordinary stereo recordings sound binaural. It's a joy to listen to live music with those cans.

[Mr Kipling]

Pearl Jam had an album out in 2000 simply called "Binaural".

[Rothchild]

I've never heard a proper Binaural recording although the guy that mastered the first 2 Pony Collaboration albums is like the national expert on the art and does lots of installations and projects using it. He had a specially designed setup that he could wear, with the mics covering his ears, and he would go out and capture all sorts of eclectic stuff

http://www.dallassimpson.com/

If you want to try doing it yourself it's quite a steep admission price, one of these:

http://www.dv247.com/assets/products/21004_l.jpg

Will set you back over £6k!

[Werner Berghofer]

Marc,

If you want to try doing it yourself it's quite a steep admission price […]
the really great, but also very expensive Neumann dummy head condenser microphone is not the only way to create binaural recordings. The Soundman (http://www.soundman.de/en) microphones can be used in human ears or in combination with a dummy head, are affordable and deliver excellent quality.

Werner.

[Rothchild]

Ooh, thanks Werner, I'd not come across those before, they appear to be excellent value.

Also, it seems you can set them up for use as a boundary layer mic (like a PZM) so that could give me 2 solutions for different approaches (given the suggestion I've been made in the soundstage thread).

[PaulStewart]

In the late 70s When I was at JVC. we worked on binaural and playback through speakers. We had a device called. BN-5 Biphonic Processor. This used a BBD to create phase an timing signals that cancelled out the crosstalk letting you hear the binaural effect. We had a load of binaural recordings, the advantage of JVC being a major record label in Asia, including a fantastic jazz recording of Junior Mance - Live at Sweet Basil on their sub label Flying Disk.

In the UK we made some good, mainly acoustic recordings with a mic I made using a polystyrene wig stand with artficial ears that had JVC 510 cardioid capsules in them, these went straight into a reel to reel with no eq. We played these back at shows via ,phones or biphonic units, this included a ghetto blaster the 828 , which had it as a gimmick. One recording was a 747 taking off, recorded from the end of the runway, this did tend to make the punters jump.

We also had quad biphonics, recorded using two heads back to back and some clever processing, it sounded amazing, giving great height impressions but would only work in an anechoic chamber.

I still have A BN-5 in my garage, I used it as a special effect when recording. i.e. tracking using a dummy head and recording the processed version when mastering, trouble was it was bad through headphones and walkmans and tapes were in vogue then, so I stopped using it. Good fun though.

[PaulStewart]

Ooh, thanks Werner, I'd not come across those before, they appear to be excellent value.

Also, it seems you can set them up for use as a boundary layer mic (like a PZM) so that could give me 2 solutions for different approaches (given the suggestion I've been made in the soundstage thread).

Marc, quick and dirty binaural I've used many times, which works quite well. 2 PZMs back to back with a 12" pizza box in between, put the mics just over half way back. Works a treat, also fill the box with damping like old newspapers. One word of caution, unlike my then tape op, remember to remove the pizza and give it to the bass player (or whichever player orders it on your session) or it could end in tears and a stained carpet :)

[Rothchild]

Interesting, thanks. I was aware that there's processors to enable stereo on headphones (such as: http://www.112db.com/redline/monitor/ ) but I'd never heard of a means of faking binaual on speakers (I've only done a cursory search so far to see if such a thing exists in the software world), that could be a lot of fun.

[daytona600]

Chesky & Fim produce Binaural CDs/XRCDs , Fim ones sound superb on a good headphone rig

[Werner Berghofer]

Scott,

Chesky & Fim produce Binaural CDs/XRCDs , Fim ones sound superb on a good headphone rig
http://www.berghofer.com/photos/gear/cover_dr_chesky.jpg

[PaulStewart]

I just had a dig through my CDs and found a Stax binaural demo which is fun. But it is obviously done to high light the cans, not be a serious recording.

The Flying Disk albums however, are music that just happens to be binaural too.

[camtwister]

"Immersive Headphone Experiments" from BBC R&D.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2014/10/binaural-experiment-surveys