Why headphones don't sound like speakers

No, I’m not dead - ok, god willing, not sure about that – but I do know for certain that you are not dead.

How can this be?

One good reason I was not road-kill last week is that I could hear the traffic approaching when I was crossing the street.

I would be very uncomfortable if I heard an approaching truck but could not tell its direction! If there is sound, I want to know where from! One can crouch at the shout of INCOMING, but it is not a happy feeling!
The ethereal non-directional sound one gets from conventional audio player headphones suggests the hereafter, but that just makes me nervous!

Now HeadP is not yet a lot better. It actually calculates the direction of direct sound and the principal echoes, but then has no use for this part of the information at present. I do get some sense of where a singer is however. With the default settings, this is above me. If I move away, toward the center of a larger virtual room, I get the impression that the singer is further away, in front of me. This is a start at least.

Echoes are very important. If you are listening to speakers in a typical room, the walls will be reflecting most of the sound that hits them. If you are listening in a tent, this is probably not the case, but Col Gaddafi recently had a bad experience with his tent. So unless you are very close to your speakers, most of the sound you are hearing has been reflected from walls, ceiling and floor.

Music production studios vary a lot in how much allowance they make for this. Some produce very “dry” sound, good for speakers in a real room, but bad for headphones. Other studios add a lot of “reverb”, which is really a compromise that fails to address the problem of sound localization at all. It totally fails to address the main problem we are discussing here.

If you use HeadP, you can choose to automatically switch to a listening environment that is appropriate to the way the music has been produced, and to your preference for the moment.