How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect

While I appreciate the effort and talent to pull this off, I find the results to be awful. I call this kind of overblown sound processing "Bose barf" since pretty much all Bose audio sounds like this, and it just grates on my nerves. Now TVs, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, etc. all seem to perform this kind of aggressive audio processing to overcome the limits of super cheap tiny drivers. It's getting hard to find devices which have a more neutral sound profile. All this audio processing makes music sound like it's coming out of a garden hose duct taped to a 1950's grade school hall speaker. I can't understand the appeal.

Interesting article. I don't know much about sound processing but it reminded me of the Fruity Convolver in FL Studio, which can somehow apply the characteristics of one sound (an impulse?) to your audio stream. It has interesting effects built in, reverbs recorded in different unusual spaces, as well as guitar amps.

I would have liked to compare the audio clip from the beginning of the article, at the end too! Instead I had to record my own voice. And there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle the effect on and off? So it's a bit hard to get a sense of what it actually does.

This also reminds me of this cool mp3 from the 2000s — maybe it's on YouTube these days — called virtual barbershop, which was recorded with binaural microphones.

Edit: here she is! https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

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