We’ve interviewed Mr. Hildebrandt so he could explain to us the breakthroughs of his invention and how it compares to other 5.1 gaming headphones already available on the market. And don’t worry about the name of his company or the product – the ideia behind it may sound lunatic, but there’s nothing psycho about it. It actually comes from Psychoacoustics, the body of science that studies how we hear and interpret sound.

How much time went into the design and testing of the Psyko 5.1 PC Gaming Headset System?
I got the original inspiration about 9 years ago and have been designing, building and testing prototypes ever since. Not all that time was spent on building and testing because a lot of time goes into all the other aspects of building a business from scratch, but there has been a lot of testing and over all the stages likely over a thousand people have tested them.

Can you say that the Waveguide system would be akin to the sound waves traveling through the air in a normal room? Was that the idea behind it?
That was exactly the idea. The goal is that the waveguide system is to guide every sound to the right location around both ears – just like the air in a normal room. 

Of course the attention went to the 5.1 experience provided by the unique speaker system. But what about the Psyko microphone? Any groundbreaking solutions or it’s just a regular mike?
The groundbreaking was in the headphones. We tested lots of mics and choose the best one.

How did you bypass the Digital Signal Processing?
By making something that works exactly like a room speaker system.  That means we take the signal that would normally go to each room speaker and connect it to the corresponding speaker up in the bridge of the headphones.  The waveguides do all the timing, volume and direction control.  Just like sound in a room it is really simple physics, and totally effective.

The setup seems kinda big. Do you think gamers would prefer a lighter and more comfortable system, especially after hours of playing?
They are heavier than traditional headphones but the Psyko headphones are all speaker chambers and waveguides, which is air, so they are a lot lighter than what most people think they would be by their looks.

Besides the science behind it, you can see that a lot of effort went into the futuristic design of the device. Was that a conscious decision, I mean, not to let it be a big, bulky ugly headphone and instead appeal to a gamer’s fashion sense?
Yes, we put a lot of effort into the design and had a couple of extremely talented people working on it.