Developer Darin S. Fong has combined his decades of experience and creativity in web design, graphics and programming, special effects systems, 3D animation, web-based art, video production, and high-end photography with his love of audio and technology to develop new personal audio software that must be heard to be believed.
Out Of Your Head software has been in development since late 2012, developed by Darin Fong along with one freelance programmer.
As Darin tells it, the idea for the software came about out of necessity. He has been a lifelong audiophile, inspired by his father, but “life tends to get in the way of expensive hobbies like high-end audio and home theater.”
“Once I had kids, high-end audio moved VERY far down on the priority list. I still loved listening to high-end audio and home theater, but I had neither the resources or the time or opportunity to listen to music. With kids in the house, there was no place to even set up hi-fi gear. There was no time to listen to music or watch movies without waking the kids or my wife. It was really impossible.”
One day, Darin realized headphones might be the answer to the problem of being able to listen to music or watch movies late at night without disturbing anyone in the house. Although he had some good headphones, like many people, he didn’t like the “sound” of headphones. The quality of the sound was good, but all the imaging and space he was accustomed to when listening to speakers was gone. All the sound was “trapped” inside his head. The image and similarity to a live performance was completely lost. And for movies, it was even worse. The 3D sound of a surround-sound home theater system was also gone. It just wasn’t acceptable.
So was born the idea of Out Of Your Head software. Darin wanted to find a way to reproduce the sound he was used to hearing from speakers and home theater in headphones. If he could do that, it would be a “game changer.” Then he and other audiophiles could have the best of both worlds: The convenience of headphone listening AND the sound of speakers.
After lots of research on the Internet and countless trial of different algorithms, Darin finally was able to create a working prototype that sounded exactly like the speakers he had measured but reproduced in headphones.
