Hello!

Everyone and their cat sells a 360 plug-in suite today.
My question is: has anyone compared or experienced the difference between different brands’ binaural rendering plugins?

I’m primarily interested in music production aspects. And not at ALL interested in going down the Dolby path.

Thinking more like is there a quality difference between rendering to binaural using say, Logic’s binaural planner vs the dearVR Music planner, etc.

Thanks!

Girilal

I am also interested.

So far with a recent film mix in Nuendo I have tried the internal Dolby plugin set to binaural and recorded the wav and it hasn't moved me at all, having mixed in 7.1.4 speakers.

I know I cant expect it to be as good. But surely there is a better plugin I can put on a 7.1.4 bus (not from the output of the Dolby plugin, just a parallel bus) that I can then record the output and add as an alternative 2nd track in the mp4 web versions of the film.

I have compared some of them over the years. DearVR pro is among the best! Lots of things can be done already with the free Sennheiser Ambeo panner. (which is now called DearVR micro) https://en-us.sennheiser.com/ambeo-orbit
But I still find that the quality of a "real" dummy head like the KU100 can not be achieved. And my old Roland RSS-10 DSP system still sounds somewhat better - but it's such a hassle to use these days...
The Fiedler-Audio system should be very good too. I did not test it yet, but it's based on the Fraunhofer 3D Reverb which I had the opportunity to try in depth during development. It sounded very good, esp. for music use.
https://fiedler-audio.com/spacelab-ignition/

Hi it's Hyunkook Lee from APL. We've launched a binaural renderer APL VIRTUOSO in April, and it's a relatively new player but has already gained a high reputation among sound engineers as one of the most accurate and natural-sounding renderers. Please check it out here: https://www.apl-hud.com/product/virtuoso

We've just updated it to v1.2.1 including AAX, as well as VST3/AU/Standalone. It's currently on Early Access sale.

In terms of comparison, there was a paper by Rai Sato et al. presented at the recent AES convention in New York, which compared 5 commercial binaural systems (Virtuoso, Apple, DearVR, NovoNotes and B&K dummy head), and Virtuoso was rated the highest in terms of overall preference and spatial fidelity.

Man, I keep trying all available solutions, but they all sound like a stereo mix with added room reflections to my ears and brain.
When moving objects around I do get the sense of front rear, but with static sounds definitely not.
And height barely is audible in a real room (unless a very big room) so let alone in binaural.