Stereo surround effects

norty303

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Can anyone point me in the direction of any 'virtual' surround effects available. I was listening to a demo of a hardware effect built into a desk that was creating the most incredible spatial sounds moving completely around my body from a stereo pair of monitors and wondered if anything was available as a plugin.

Is this achieved by clever phasing algorythms or what?
 
Binaural processing can be done by Soundhack on the mac and Prosoniq have a plugin that can do it too.

It is done by measuring the sound refelections in your lug 'ole from source sounds in various locations and emulating that sound from the usual stereo placement.

I have attached a little experiment I was doing it is a bunch of samples at three elevations above, ear and below ear level and at the twelve clock face positions, thirty six samples. The original sound I processesd wasn't the best to have used but Soundhack has a strange interface and I didn't listen till I processed everything.

Thought it would be cool to have a track with sounds wizzing around in opposite directions at different heights.
 
As a general note on this.

I read somewhere that you have to be very careful with this particular type of effect, as the sound will vary quite drastically from setup to setup. (even more than usual :) ) This makes it veryyyyy difficult to envisiage taking into clubs, if you can't trust what your ears are telling you, which is - let's face it - a large part of what this effect is trying to acheive.

It sounds interesting though, and I'd love to find out just how much these sounds do change. If anyone knows of a freeware PC fingy, I'd lvoe to know about it too, or if anyone knows how they work, i might try and build one for us. Might.
 
It works on stereo speakers and idealy on headphones but I think a club system isn't going to work unless the listener stands right in the sweet spot and faces the sound source the whole time.

Here are some interesting mac only plugins, one of which can do biaural filtering. http://www.soundhack.com/shapers.php
 
I was thinking of using it sparsely in a track, you may notice it, you may not but in a room full of people 'someone' will hear some sort of effect. I was thinking of using it more for mix CDs by preparing some tracks using the effect so when I'm/other people are listening at home the occassional 'holy fuck, did you hear that!:)' moment are added to the mix. I'm sure I've heard stuff with it on in the past and that's the sort of exclamation I made!! :)


The most impressive thing about this hardware processor i heard was that someone else was having it demo'd first and i was stood way out of the central position and i heard some pretty impressive effects from there.
 
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