In all likelihood they've had to tune things to a very fine degree, both in dsp and in the physical driver design. Because these are used in the near field, with the specific intent of leveraging acoustic cues from the outer ear, they won't be able to just reuse a reference curve developed for headphones or speakers.
They have a dummy head for binaural measurements, so this isn't a particular hard thing for them to calibrate.
And yet they're reinventing open headphones and calling it revolutionary? Only a little sarcastic.
And they didn’t say “revolutionary” or similar anywhere, as far as I can see.
These are simply open backed headphones that use a different method of setting the distance between the driver and the ear. That's all.
Here's a whitepaper on the driver technology they're using: https://www.tectonicaudiolabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...
This is the first time I'm aware of anyone has used this class of driver for headphones, and they have novel properties that support their idea of a spaced nearfield monitor rather than an open or closed back cup.
There's no seal on or around the ears like traditional headphones. Additionally, they sit much farther away from the ears compared to existing headphone designs.
All an audio playback system needs to do is reproduce the original sound accurately, perhaps with some Fletcher-Munson compensation to enhance bass at low listening volumes.
(Interestingly, this sort of feature was present on home stereos for several decades. The poorly-named "loudness" knob increased bass so you could enjoy satisfying bass without increasing the overall system volume...)
It's a great way to get speakers to sound "bigger" than they are, at volume settings.
However, I have to wonder - for those with Audyssey-equipped receivers, what % of owners bother to complete the setup process with the calibration microphone? I suspect that number is unfortunately low. :-/
Also, I don't think too many people listen to music on AV receivers these days. The product category itself seems to be fading.
Home theaters have swung toward soundbars, and music is listened to on computers, mobile devices, and/or Bluetooth speakers.
I'm saying this as a pretty old-school stalwart myself, with a fairly capable AV receiver in the living room for video and a bunch of audiophile-ish two channel gear for music.
Just like what has happened to stereo amplifiers, what is happening is that the opportunistisk low end of the market is moving on. Cheap radios, turntables and amplifiers were replaced with cheap plastic mini/micro stereos, which were in turn replaced by all-in-ones, which were replaced by bluetooth speakers, and so on.
Cheap AV receivers and especially cheap home-theater-in-a-box type products have been replaced by sound bars, which I would say is actually an improvement in a lot of cases. Some of the low-end AV receivers that were on the market in the 90s and 2000s were unmitigated garbage and a waste of money.
Quality fifi separates live on, and you can still buy mini/micro stereos and all-in-one radio/media player devices. You can still buy AV receivers, but the worst cheap ones have disappeared. I'm not sure you can actually buy HTIB junk anymore, but good riddance to that rubbish.
The appreciation for good sound lives on, but the more complicated devices move to more of a niche role, sticking around for those of us who desire really good sound, and don't mind a bit of a complicated setup process. For everyone else, a sound bar with a wireless subwoofer gets them most of the way, with significantly less effort.
Listening on a computer is simply the next replacement for turntables, tape decks, CD players, DVD/Bluray players, standalone streaming devices and so on. My primary media source is an ultra small form factor PC streaming FLAC and DVD/BR rips from my NAS, hooked up to my receiver over HDMI. It's almost too easy to get amazing sound quality today.
Similarly a smartphone will produce great sound quality with decent source material. The playback device has become a footnote, they're all capable of great sound quality today, as long as you pipe it to something higher quality than a cheap soundbar/bluetooth speaker.
It looks really flat -- and you'd ordinarily think that was good, but it turns out that humans don't have equally sensitive hearing at all frequencies. There are a range of curves from different studies, and most musical transducers pick one of those curves and try to emulate it in hardware, so that a smooth frequency sweep from low to high continues to sound equally loud.
Perhaps Valve is planning on adding that through digital equalization.