Every once in a while somebody comes along and think outside the box about something rather conventional, like the headphone for instance. One of those people is James Hildebrandt, a mechanical engineer with graduate training in acoustics and methods to simulate engineering physics. He’s the founder and CEO of Psyko Audios Labs, which is releasing the Psyko 5.1 PC Gaming Headset System. The device uses airflow to simulate a home theater in your head (calling it the Waveguide system), bypassing Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and avoiding latency altogether. It aims to deliver naturally immersive sound and precision directionality.

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Figure 1: The Psyko 5.1 PC Gaming Headset System.

The revolutionary part about the device’s design is that the speakers are not placed in the ear cups, for starters. They are placed above the user’s head in the bridge of the headphone. The WaveGuide system directs all the front sounds to flow past the front of the ears, and all the rear sounds to flow past the rear of the ears just like how sounds interact with a person’s ears in a room system.

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Figure 2: How it works.