From tande.adamson@btinternet.com Sun Feb 22 06:18:24 2004
Subject:Whilst on the subject of headphones for clone and other applications.

Listening to phones is not as straight forward as you might believe.
Basically you are listening to an output, whether it be DVD, CD, or
clone or whatever that in stereo has been designed to feed two ( or
more loudspeakers )
The reason that this output is not satisfactory for phones is that our
ears are being fed information that ( in theory at least ) is designed
to reproduce sound from a co-incident pair of mics, whereas our ears
are spread out on either side of our heads.
To get a better, infinitely more realistic effect, binaural stereo
sets out to cater for this by placing mics on a dummy head. The
difference is truly amazing as sounds can be heard on the re-producing
headphones appearing to come from outside the head, appearing to
emanate from behind, side to side, up and down, and front.
An unfortunate result of using phones on normal stereo is that the
listener tends to turn up the volume to compensate for unavailable
location signals, which can damage hearing over time. Also the effect
of using phones to listen to ordinary vanilla stereo is that it can
become fatiguing.
As for listening to clones on headphones, particularly in regard to
the Leslie sim I have found, the left and right signals tend to be
unduly exaggerated.

Computers nowadays mostly have headphone circuitry to accomodate this
effect and adjust the L & R signals to compensate for listening on
phones to ordinary stereo designed for speakers.
I use headphones a lot, and some years ago bought a Sennheiser
Surround Sound Headphone amp which does the same thing.
This has a substantial effect on the rotary simulation.

A more recent product ( the SBC HP1500 ) is slated for distribution
soon from Philips, and is a headphone amp using Dolby Headphone
technology.
Dolby Headphone has more powerful algorithms and is even better than
my older Sennheiser Lucas Surround Amp.

If you use headphones to any great extent, for what it's worth, I
would whole-heartedly recommend trying this out. There are several
programs designed to act as plug -ins for poular computer audio
players like Winamp.

Do a Google search for Dolby Headphone.
Thomas.