Despite advances in audio technology, the design of the typical headphone speaker hasn’t changed much in the past century. Until now, that is.

Psyko Audio Labs, a Calgary-based company, has introduced a revolution in headphone design and aims to provide video gamers with a truer hearing experience. CEO James Hildebrandt explains that Psyko Audio comes from psychoacoustics, the study of how humans perceive sound. In the new design, the speakers, or sound drivers, are located in the headband.

Hildebrandt, a mechanical engineer by trade and training, has been working on his headphone revolution for eight years. Speaking from his office in the tech park just north of the University of Calgary, he says that the unveiling of the new technology came in January in Las Vegas, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

There, Psyko won the top design award for engineering and design in the headphone category, and it was a finalist in the gaming category, along with an Nvidia product and a Wii product. “It’s a tremendous feeling and tremendous honour,” he says. The new headphones, which are specifically designed for video games, will sell for $299.99 when they are released later this spring, and will be sold through the Psyko website: www.psykoaudio.com.

Sound is a critical component in video games. All games incorporate sound effects, music and dialogue as part of an overall game experience, but some, like KORG DS-10, which turns your Nintendo DS into a music synthesizer, are all about sound. The music in Spore is procedurally generated, which means no musical score and no looping of musical paragraphs. It came from Brian Eno, who has been working on generative music for years.

When playing first-person shooters and other competitive games, such as Counter Strike, Halo 3, Far Cry 2 and Killzone 2, sound is even more important. “When you’re playing a game and there is a footstep or a voice of a gunshot at a certain place in the game, traditional headphones will play the sound in your ear, but you can’t tell where it comes from,” explains Hildebrandt. “There is no directionality.”

Psyko headphones change that, because as the sound waves are generated in the headband of the phones, they are transported to the earcups where they flow over a user’s ears the same way sound waves would in a natural environment.

With other headphones, Hildebrandt says, the experience of surround and directional sound is created in one of two ways. It can be done digitally, using a process called digital signal processing (DSP), which uses mathematical algorithms to delay sounds that are intended to be perceived as coming from various locations. That process doesn’t allow for individual differences in ear shape, however, and the time it takes for DSP to occur introduces a lag in the sound. That latency can be the difference between virtual life and death for competitive players.

The other method of creating the perception of surround sound is to place multiple speakers around each ear in the earcups of the headphones. The problem with this method, says Hildebrandt, is that sounds intended to be perceived as coming from behind and to the left are only played into the left ear, which is not a natural experience. Psychoacoustic research, Hildebrandt explains, has shown that the brain tries to filter and ignore sounds that are only heard in one ear, ostensibly because such sounds aren’t natural. In the natural environment, even if a sound is coming from the left, your right ear detects the sound wave. “It’s a very crucial part” of hearing, says Hildebrandt.

Although Psyko’s first headphones are designed to optimize the video game experience, Hildebrandt says that his company will “come out with models that are tuned for the best movie experience, and tuned for the best music experience.”