7.1 surround to HRTF / Virtualized Surround Sound?

[Scout339]

I read here that someone kind of had the same effect as what I'm asking, but coming from Razer Surround on Windows, I am already able to mimic it's compressor using EasyEffects (yay!) but what I still miss is that Razer Surround was also able to take 7.1 surround sound and convert it to binaural audio / HRTF, which only needs headphones to accomplish.

I know that in that discussion they were also wondering if it was placebo, and I can tell you that a proper 'downmix' - I believe that it's called - From 7.1 to HRTF would be measurably noticeable.

I wanted to bring this conversation up because many more games have 7.1 surround support, but hardly any do HRTF / virtual 7.1 surround correctly. So the ability to have all my games on 7.1 and have Easyeffects do the heavy lifting, I would be so excited to have positional audio back! If you do implement this feature, consider tuning the 'downmix' in a similar way that Razer Surround does it.

[wwmm]

Handling surround in EasyEffects as things are right now is quite complicated. PipeWire has a module that deals with HTRF. Integrating this on our side is also a challenge. The final pipeline would have to be something like

surround player -> pipewire hrtf module -> EasyEffects sink -> effects -> soundcard

. But the problem is that by default EasyEffects will try to move the players from the hrtf module to our virtual sink. This can be disabled. But the fact the user has to manually set the hrtf module and move apps to it remains.

[Scout339]

Does this mean that it's currently possible but slightly complicated? I personally am not opposed to a little bit of setup if it means that I can have directional audio.

[wwmm]

Does this mean that it's currently possible but slightly complicated? I personally am not opposed to a little bit of setup if it means that I can have directional audio.

I did not try myself. But I think there is a chance it can work.