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Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but commercial spatial audio is in its infancy. We’re maybe in the 1920’s if you compare it to video. So as the techniques expands and people adjust and both sides gain experience we’ll be able to compensate for the perceived shortcomings by exaggerating effectively to make it seem better than our natural spacial hearing.

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To get there people have to have a clear perception of what "the gap" is between what is and what's possible -- like the error signal in a negative feedback loop.

In reality people will think a service sounds better if Dr. Dre, Jay-Z or Neil Young is behind it.

If people watch a bad orchestra playing in good clothes or they watch a good orchestra play in bad clothes they'll likely think the well dressed orchestra sounds better.

A world like that just doesn't have the capacity to improve.

Spot on about the orchestra. A chap used to know used to work for Midas and said that visuals affect perception of quality significantly. They had a problem with a digital desk where the UI was running at very slow framerates and the customer complained that it sounded terrible. If they turned around and listened without looking at the screen they thought it sounded absolutely fine - merely seeing the flickery slow framerates made them believe it SOUNDED terrible.

And you're right about the inability to improve. Try reading up above where people are arguing that they can't hear the difference between a WAV and a 128 kbps MP3....!! Either their hearing is absolutely shot or they are listening to silence.

Fair warning, any attempts in this area will have to take your individual ear shape into account to be accurate. Our brains have learned how sounds change based on the frequency changes due to our individual ear shapes, and any software that wants to emulate true spatial sound will have to take this into account.

This sounds like a very interesting project, especially if it could be done just by taking pictures of both your ears (I'm not sure if that's sufficient to capture all of the topology.) Generating a sufficiently large dataset to learn how that topology relates to sound perception sounds incredibly expensive though.

Sure, but I'd bet that accounting for a handful of shapes (maybe less than 10) could cover 90% of the differences. We've applied that principle to everything else in the body pretty well so far. It will take a good bit of time to figure out what those shapes might be though.

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