EPOS BrainAdapt™ - Audio Designed for Your Brain
Did you know that while we hear with our ears, we listen with our brain? At EPOS we put this principle at the heart of our design process – an approach we call EPOS BrainAdapt™, leading to less fatigue, faster reaction times and better in-game decision making.
When you’re immersed in a game, it may feel intuitive that it’s your ears that are doing all the hard work. But in fact, though it’s our ears that hear the audio, it’s the brain that’s listening, and interpreting the sound cues for your “inner gamer”.
Three processes take place when you’re listening to audio – orientation, where the brain works out what direction each sound is coming from, focus, where it filters unwanted noise from the signal, and recognition, the process of interpretation of the audio.
At EPOS, we have learned from more than a decade of intensive psychoacoustic research that the secrets that unlock great gaming audio products are hidden deep within your brain.
Delivering gamers excellence in audio is not as simple as using the right components and assembling them well. Understanding how your brain listens gives us the insight to engineer the competitive edge, long-term listening comfort, and maximum immersion.
We call this EPOS BrainAdapt™ technology, a scientific, evidence-based approach to designing our audio products that begins in the research laboratory.
North of Copenhagen is the location of Eriksholm Research Centre, a world-leading facility for experts pushing the boundaries of psychoacoustics, hearing and behavioral sciences, audiology and signal processing.
By testing the technologies and designs of EPOS products and examining how effectively and efficiently our brain is listening, we can perfect our engineering approach. For example, we can test and prove that a particular frequency response really does result in lower listening fatigue over an extended gaming session. We can demonstrate that the natural-sounding vocal response from our microphones makes it easier for your brain to focus and recognize.
Measuring how our brain reacts to audio inputs allows us to design and tune our engineering and technological solutions to give the optimal listening experience.
We use a technique known as pupillometry to measure the size of a listener’s pupils – the larger the pupil, the more the brain activity, and in the right control conditions we know it’s because they are having to concentrate harder to process the audio they are hearing, which leads to fatigue, slower reaction times and poor in-game decision-making.
For example, if we are testing a tuning for a headset speaker and we’re playing back the audio from the heat of battle in a competitive game, we know the results are optimal when the pupils are at their smallest across all the tests.
Other techniques include memory tests which will be better performed when the listener is finding the “focus” step easier, and live scanning to examine which parts of the brain are in use during an audio session and which aspect of the listening process is under stress.
EPOS BrainAdapt™ minimizes the amount of time and energy it takes your brain to process sound. When it comes to gaming audio, gamers with the EPOS BrainAdapt™ advantage can stay fresh longer, react faster and enjoy clearer team communication – making better decisions from moment to moment, fully immersed in a realistic and natural soundscape.