Comparison of Localization Performance for Five-Channel Surround Sound Reproduction and Headphone Reproduced Binaural Synthesis in a Gaming Environment

This paper focus mainly on comparing the localization performance in a gaming environment with a five channel surround sound system and with headphone reproduced binaural synthesis. A listening test was performed with a custom created simulation of a gaming environment with a visual environment where the test subject was only allowed to control the head movements. The environment was created with Unreal 3. The test measured the test subjects’ speed and accuracy in pinpoint the sound sources, with footsteps used as stimulus, placed at different positions spread out around the character played in a random order. The results indicate that it is significantly more difficult to locate sound sources with headphones than with loudspeakers in both time difference with a 0.79 seconds time difference between the the two test’s medians and with a 11.962° MAE difference between the two test’s mean values and are both statistically significant with a 95% confidence value. The issues with binaural synthesis are discussed and possible future work is proposed.\u2028Validerat; 20140529 (global_studentproject_submitter