Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards CLP785 manual says disable binaural when using Aux out

I’m using Aux out patched to a headphone amp to boost volume. Should I disable binaural? Or is that just if you go to monitors? It does sound a little off, but not sure if I’ve decided I don’t like binaural on when using the external amp to headphones.

What if I send Aux out into an audio interface for recording, like my UAD twin? Should I disable binaural then?

The reason why the manual recommend you to disable the binaural mode is that this mode is not optimized for speakers.

If you use headphones, it is recommended to enable the binaural mode, and I guess that you have to plug something in your headphones jack (adapter), to be sure to have this mode on.

Not sure why the amp is affecting binaural when you use headphones.

Binaural audio works by leveraging tiny changes in 1) timing differences of sounds reaching each of your ears, 2) volume differences of the same, and 3) tone changes from occlusions of sounds passing through your head/ears etc. Probably a lot more here, too (look up head related transfer function if you are iinterested. The important thing is that it is made specifically to output sound from one stereo channel to one ear and not the other, which is why you need to use headphones to isolate what each ear heads.

If the amp it somehow affecting the stereo channel timing or volume differences or otherwise coloring the sound (I don't know what amps can put are likely to do) then it may affect the binaural effect.

Ideally, if you like binaural and you are going to use headphones (or you are recording and specifically instructing listeners to use headphones) then keep binaural on. If your output will be used with speakers or you don't know if headphones will be involved, turn it off.

Why not use the headphone jack to drive the headphone amp?

If you did that (unplug from the headphone jack when using speakers, and plug into the headphone jack when using headphones), the "binaural <---> speaker stereo" switching would probably be automatic. You'd probably want to turn off "binaural" when recording, if you use headphones to monitor your recording sessions.

Interesting feature. Anybody know if there are two different sets of samples? So if the 'binaural' samples are heading out to the headphones socket, then does it mean that a different set of sound samples are heading out to the AUX socket?

So the digital instrument can be outputting two different sets of samples (ok ---- reconstructed sounds from the samples) simultaneously - one set going to the headphones, while the other set goes out to the AUX?

Binaural usually means different samples, recorded with something like a Neumann KU100. Yamaha has a distinction between Binaural (different samples), and Sterophonic Optimizer (same samples but processed to sound like binaural).

Thanks frederic. Will that also mean that when the headphones aren't plugged in, then the instrument just automatically switches to the non-binaural counterpart samples? (That's for cases where there are binarual and non-binaural sample pairs) That's what I'm assuming only at the moment.

Normally, the piano will select automatically the binaural settings depending of wether an headphones pair is plugged in the headphones speakers.

Then ON is the correct and default settings for most situations.

The OFF setting is required when you use the AUX output (speakers or recorder) AND the headphones and then don’t want binaural.

If you want binaural, just keep the settings on ON (the default), and plug something on the headphones jack to make the piano believe you have headphones.

From the N1X manual :

Nice one. Thanks very much Frederic. Your description is ultra clear. That would be awesome to include in their manual!

I wanted to avoid having the additional gain stage. If I output from the headphone jack I will pass on any noise generated there. Using the pre-amp Aux outs, the only gain stage is the headphone amp.

The annoying part is that you then need to plug something in to the headphone jack (or dig through the menus) to disable the onboard CLP speakers.