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Far ear
hears
slight delay
Imagine you are listening to a pair of speakers and you turn off the left speaker, both ears
continue to hear the sound from the right speaker. But because the left ear is slight farther
away than the right, it hears the sound slightly after the right ear. This time difference is
called the "inter-aural time difference" and it is the main thing your brain listens to for left-
to-right sound imaging.
But in headphones if you turn off the left channel, only the right ear hears the sound. In
headphones, if there is any sound that is only in the left channel, or only in the right chan-
nel, then only that ear hears the sound. This is not natural, and you brain becomes fatigued
trying to figure out where sound is coming from. This problem with headphones tends to
create an audio image that is three blobs, left, right, and center.
HeadRoom amplifiers cure this problem by allowing you to cross-feed a little of the left and
right channels through a short time delay using the crossfeed switch. The usefulness of the
circuit varies depending on what type of recording you are listening to: old studio recordings
(beatles and old jazz for example) that have instruments hard panned left or right, benefit
greatly from the processor; mono and binaural recordings need no processor at all; live and
classical recordings miked from a distance benefit somewhat less, and can often be listened
to without the processor quite comfortably.
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What does the HeadRoom Crossfeed Do?
30 degrees
off axis
Near ear
hears
sound first
Plain Headphones
The crossfeed switch in HeadRoom ampli-
fiers allow you to cross-feed a little of the
left and right channels across to eachother
through a short time delay.
With HeadRoom
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