LIVEBOX – the first audiophile speaker with built-in «Crosstalk Cancellation» audio treatment
The so called binaural technology, which is the base for the LIVEBOX, has a long history.
Decades ago many live or radio drama recordings have been made using a dummy head microphone (shown below). This head has microphones built into its ears, which allow to record an event in a similar way a listener would hear it.
The idea now is to bring the two recorded channels unchanged to the ears of a listener. The left channel shall go to the left ear only and the right channel to the right ear only. This means there must not be any crosstalk from left to right or right to left. With such a setup it is possible to reproduce the recorded live event with incredible realism. A headphone allows to convey the signals to the ears without any crosstalk. Only, the headphone based playback got other problems, causing such a playback of a dummy head recording often to be unsatisfying. If it would be possible to play back the recording via speakers then the headphone related problems would be gone. With speakers there are strong crosstalk components present though.
Exactly this a «Crosstalk Cancellation» (XTC) speaker tries to avoid. With clever signal processing this can be achieved to a certain degree. The result you can hear with our LiveBox.
The name LIVEBOX we created because the playback of live recordings is very impressive with the LiveBox. The acoustics of the recording venue is reproduced in a 3D manner. The musical instruments can be clearly located on a 3D stage. Even ordinary studio recordings can be enhanced with an XTC based playback system.
In order to hear the XTC effect the listener has to be located on the center line as shown below. To the left or to the right of the center line the effect is not noticeable.
The LIVEBOX we designed in cooperation with the companies PSI Audio and Illusonic. PSI Audio is a speaker manufacturer and Illusonic is an audio algorithm designing company.
