Whether it's to stop your neighbours calling the police, to get superb audio quality at a fraction of the cost of speakers or simply to keep your ears warm, many gamers rely upon stereo headphones to deliver their gaming soundscape. If you're part of this group, we'd like to introduce you to a piece of software that is going to change the way you hear your games. MyEars is an Australian software solution delivering full 3D Positional Audio over stereo headphones. We visited the company behind this exciting technology to discuss its development. More importantly, we also put it to the test - and you can too.

The maestro behind the music
Personal Audio is a small outfit based at Sydney University, and at its centre is Simon Carlile, CTO and CEO of the company. With a background in Sensory Neuroscience, Simon has spent over 20 years researching how the brain interprets sound, which led to the foundation of Personal Audio, a company specialising in 3D audio technology. Our demo of the technology was presented by Simon, and it soon became apparent that he's not just in this for the money - he's truly passionate about the role hearing plays in immersing people into virtual environments.

So then, what is MyEars?


The first step in the tuning is the most crucial, and the trickiest
MyEars explained
In the real world, humans hear in 3D using just two ears - we can easily pinpoint whether a sound source is in front, behind, above or below us. So it follows that we should be able to replicate this 3D positioning using just two speakers. Our brain delivers the perception of 3D audio via the use of Head Related Transfer Functions, or HRTFs for short. These contain all of the listening cues that are applied to a sound as it travels from its source, through the environment, to the listener's ears. Obviously this changes depending on which direction the sound comes from, and is influenced heavily by the shape of the listener's ears.

The brain then takes this HRTF information to generate the 3D positional audio, projecting the audio so that it sounds like it's happening outside of your head. Because the shape of your ears are unique to you, so too are your HRTFs; think of your HRTFs as a kind of audio fingerprint.

MyEars is not the first 3D audio technology to mimic these HRTFs to deliver 3D audio from stereo speakers. The most common version on the market today is Dolby Headphone, but it has one very important difference to the superior MyEars solution. Dolby uses a one-size fits all approach to creating a generic set of HRTFs, which are identical no matter who uses the headphones. This generic HRTF approach is also used by Creative, Gen Audio and QSound.

The creators of MyEars realised this approach does not work well, due to the very individual shape of our ears, which in turn creates a unique set of HRTFs for each listener. Over many years of testing, they discovered that what works for one person is useless for others. Over time they developed a set of archetypes, or audio profiles, that could be tailored and tweaked to give a truly unique HRTF for each individual user. This is why MyEars has a tuning process before it can be used. The gamer must first run a series of listening tests, which take around ten minutes to complete. By the end of the test, a customised HRTF is created for that person, delivering 3D surround sound far superior to that offered by the likes of Dolby. Simon explains it rather nicely, saying ""All of the software solutions out there make an assumption that one size fits all, the filtering that they do so that your brain perceives a sound is outside your head is going to be the same for everybody. We know from a lot of research in the lab over the last twenty years that is just not the case. The solution that Personal Audio has created in MyEars is a method that individualises that filter for your ear. So in fact, the ears that you tune may not work for your mate."

MyEars - future plans
When MyEars was in the early stages of development, the team discovered that one of the gaming industry's top audio engine developers is located in Melbourne. Firelight Technologies is a small outfit behind FMOD, a proprietary audio library and engine used in more than half of today's biggest games. You can find their audio engine powering the likes of StarCraft II, Crysis, BioShock, Forza and many, many more.

It seems the chaps at Firelight were rather impressed by MyEars, as the technology is being integrated into FMOD from the ground up. This means that in six to twelve months time, triple A games that use the FMOD audio system will be MyEars enabled. You'll simply need to point the game to your MyEars profile, and true 3D sound via headphone will be yours.


By this stage, tuning becomes much faster and easier
Try MyEars Today
But what about today's games? MyEars has a solution for these too, and you can try it right now. Head over to www.myears.net.au, where you'll be able to download the MyEars beta software, free for use for the first month. This small software download inserts a software layer between your game and your headphones, and the only thing necessary for 3D sound over headphones is that the game can do surround sound, a given on most of today's titles. The hardware requirements are non-existent. According to Simon, " What we've found with our testing so far is that if you've got a quad core or an i7, it creams it, no problem at all." However, if your machine is a relic from the late nineties, you may be out of luck. "If you're running on a dual core, it's going to depend on how CPU heavy the game is. On the lower end machines you sometimes find that the audio is degraded." We ran the software on a quad core i5 and saw no performance decrease.

During our test session at Simon's office, the difference between MyEars 3D audio and stereo sound was quite simply massive - while playing BioShock it truly conveyed the sense that we were surrounded by sounds, and we could pinpoint exactly which direction individual sounds were coming from. We've used Dolby Headphone much in the past, and while it does an ok job, MyEars is exponentially improved. Don't take our word for it though - with a free one month trial we implore you to visit the site and try out the software. The setup phase is a little tricky at first, but we soon learnt how to do it quickly and accurately. We highly recommend doing the sound test several times to get the best possible profile.

Unfortunately we had some issues with MyEars on our home test PC - it doesn't seem to play too well with our Asus Xonar DX sound card, introducing a slight stutter to sound effects. Simon is looking into these issues, and we should remind you that the software is still in beta. Update - We've just tested the newest version, and the problem is gone. If you have any issues, try increasing the buffer size in the advanced configuration menu.

With a proper launch in the near future, the eventual plan for MyEars is a yearly subscription around the $60 point - a competitive price considering Dolby Headphones cost in the region of $200.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie
Considering just how important sound is when it comes to delivering an immersive gaming experience, it's strange that we hear so little about improvements in game audio. Thankfully Personal Audio has realised that more work can be done in this field of game development, and MyEars is just the first step in the company's efforts to improve the way we listen to our games. It's fantastic to see an Aussie company behind one of the most promising leaps in sound quality to hit the PC this decade.

We hope you give this homegrown technology a try. If you do, let us know what you thought - did you notice a better soundscape than standard stereo audio? How does it compare to your experience with Dolby Headphone Surround? Let us know in the comments.