Abstract

A head mounted surround sound virtual positioning system that includes a video recorder (200), which is operable to have disposed therein a tape (202), having a surround sound audio track associated therewith. The surround sound system is encoded on two channels, which are output to a Dolby.RTM. decoder (204), which is operable to extract the five surround sound system channels therefrom. The left front, left rear, right front and right rear channels are input to a virtual positioning system (264), which is operable to virtually position each of the speakers relative to the head of the listener (26). These signals are then combined with a combining circuit (268) to provide the virtual positioning of only two speaker lines (58) and (60), disposed adjacent the right and left ears of the listener (26). The speakers (58) and (60) are disposed on the head mounted system such that they are fixed relative to the ear of the listener and slightly forward of the ears and adjacent the head. The center speaker signal output of the decoder (204) is output from a separate external speaker (310).