Comment by shiroiushi
7 months ago
>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it
Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.
Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
I haven't looked into it, no (and certainly not on Windows!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's already readily available software that does exactly this. Even my phone has a bunch of options for altering the sound, including something called "DTS:X 3D Surround".