Help with wiring colors on old headphones

What was new was that they could take close miked material and use digital processing to move it around the binaural sound stage at will.

The old way involved microphones inside a headlike dummy with ears.

Regards, Martin Brown

Right.

Seems to have gone out of fashion. R4 used to have the odd play recorded dummy head - but not recently.

The late J Gordon Holt described the effect (for him) as cleaning out everything inside his end.

How bothered you are by it depends on how sensitive you are to "phasiness".

There is nothing wrong with listening to mono with reverse polarity. But if you listen to stereo that way -- you will, indeed, have the purists down on you.

If the signal is mono, you'll have pretty much nothing left to listen to. If it's stereo, the mono components will be cancelled, the L- and R-only components retained, with components in-between subjected to varying degrees of attenuation.

And, yes, Phil, whether or not you like it, what I've just said is 100% correct.

You've certainly set the cat amongst the pidgeons. It's getting right leary in here. So a search topic for you: How do barn owls locate prey just by listening?

Once you've done a search on that relevant subject: Spatial hearing (a collection of files to enjoy)

Acoustic Holography (A bit of engineering)

Now some more subjects for you to type into the search engine of your choice:

Psychoacoustics Cochlear nuclei Neural action potentials. Auditory masking Missing fundamental Hypersonic effect Diana Deutsch Dr. Daniel J. Levitin Sound localization by the human auditory system Lateral information Interaural time differences Phase delays Group delays Parallel processing pathways in the brain Axons of the auditory nerve

I'll check back in a week or so. PS. Ever heard of Q-Sound?

Only tangentially related, and mostly useless:

Amateur radio folks like building direct conversion receivers (i.e., mix down to baseband). They're simple, hence little, and they work pretty well. Their biggest problem is that they have no audio image rejection at all -- listening with a 7040kHz oscillator, you'll hear a signal at

You can get around this by making a so-called "phasing" receiver (basically an image-reject downconverter, but ham radio has its own terminology), but then you're back to something complex.

If you build an I/Q downconverter, and amplify each channel to a headphone channel, then apparently you get a spatial perception of the tones -- upper side tones sound like they're coming from a different point in space than lower side tones, and (presumably due to the phase shift in the amplifiers, I don't know) high and low tones do as well. It's claimed that this makes it easier to use for morse code reception.

I've always thought that was interesting, but haven't tried it.

ew

ck

ch

-holography

Learn a bit about Kemar Manikin here:

That's the _second_ biggest problem - the biggest is that they're an unlicensed transmitter.

Hope This Helps! Rich

If they are the standard voice coil types, put them in front of a stereo speaker and drive the amp with a sine wave. The headphone 'speakers' will act as microphones. Use an oscilloscope on the pairs of leads to determine phasing.

Was this some kind of dummy head recording or some kind of ambisonics (Gerzon) WXYZ recording ?

Puking two speakers with front panels against each other is a quite easy way to check polarity. If the polarity is correct, you will hear some low frequency sounds emitted from the combination. If the polarity is wrong, you will hear only mid- and high pitch sounds, since the low frequency air is moving between the cones of the speakers.

With headphones, you either get "in head" or unrealistic sound depending on the phasing of headphones.

Sennheiser did the wiring correctly by keeping all four wires separate and connected to a 4 pin DIN plug and by adding a 4 pin DIN to 6.35 mm plug adaptor.

As a kid, I was really pissed of by the convention of using common returns in headphones. I was testing frequency diversity reception of the same broadcast programs on two different shortwave bands with two receivers. Unfortunately, the other receiver was of AC/DC type with the full 220 Vac in the chassis. Thus I had to rewire the phones so that one side could (potentially) siting on 220 Vac, and the other side sitting close to ground potential.

After this alteration, I had no problems with this arrangement.

No problems, no problems, no problems :-)

Digital alteration of the phase and amplitude response with frequency applicable only to sounds with reasonably complex harmonic content.

The demo was a church bell that was made to ring up then down on axis, left then right as in a ping pong stereo demo and finally at the corners of a rectangle. It just sounded odd on loudspeakers.

If my memory serves I think they said that sounds coming from above have slightly more high frequency components and a phase lead. The adjustment fools the brain into putting the sound where it "belongs".

Regards, Martin Brown

Good job the phones were well insulated, otherwise..ZZZT !

;-)

Search Google for "disposable headphone covers". Something like these: (towards bottom of page). Pack them with something soft (foam, tissue paper, rolled cloth, old rags, etc) and place them over your headphones.

Or, if you're into crochet, you can knit your own:

If not, try old socks:

Full disclosure: I haven't tried any of the above, but have made some covers from cloth, elastic, some foam, and with a serger.

I will. Phil, just forward my posts to snipped-for-privacy@altopia.com with complete headers. That's really all you can do unless you plan a trip to Ohio to blow my brains out. Here's some friendly advise, buy a one way ticket.

"John Fields"

.... Phil

Something that furrow one's brow?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" snipped-for-privacy@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: