You're post is thoughtful, indeed. It's beyond me how it's processed, but it's been addressed by other friends here in neogaf who have their HRTF measured and musicians, like
thurnishaleygw
. Hope he can give us more insight.
You don't need Pulse 3D, you only need a good 2.0 channel stereo headset.
Well, let's break it down a bit:
3D audio is definitely meant to be experienced with headphones as a primary listening device. Mainly because, aside from adding a sense of height without the need for setups like Dolby Atmos, it sets the sounds within a certain series of parameters like the time delay when a sound is coming from the left side reaches the right side, therefore creating the sense of locality and space for that sound. That's when HRTF comes into place, it's the groundwork upon which these calculations and algorithms are set, further enhancing the sense of immersion.
It can be done on speakers too, but it is more complex, and the work to be done for the listening sweet spot to be as big as possible to be able to perceive that locality and presence is huge. If that sweet spot is a small one, you couldn't even move while playing, because that immersion would be lost. Doing this on a surround sound gives a little bit of an easier job than on TV speakers, from the point of view of mere options when placing sounds around the setup, but at the same time having more points of emission of sound means the crosstalk (hearing indistinctly what's supposed to come from one side on the other side) grows exponentially, and the actual precision of the 3D imaging won't be the same, not until transaural audio and crosstalk cancellation is more advanced and starts reaching the market. To summarize the concept behind that, there's the basic distinction between having a 2 channel sound source vs a 3D Audio one on headphones, which is quite easy to understand. On a stereo source, if we were to just emit sound from the left channel, you would only hear it on your left ear without any kind of spatial parameters affecting that sound, while on a 3D Audio environment, via what's calculated in relation to HRTF, the sound would positively reach your ear canals in a more realistic manner with the added calculations for time delay, resulting in a better sense of space. It would do so in different manners, depending on distance, intensity of the sound and so on, but in order to trick your brain into the feeling of being on a place, that transfer of sound must be addressed. It's the same on a surround system, but obviously it's more complex to do so in a way where it can work for any kind of setup, given that they won't know distance between the speakers, distance between speakers and listener and other variables.
Long story short, the easiest and most effective way to take advantage of 3D Audio, right now, is definitely a good set of headphones.
You wouldn't need any extra hardware basically because the output of the mix, even if it's 3D Audio, is a 2 channel output (when talking about headphones, obviously). The gist of it all are the HRTF-based calculations and doing a good usage of things like binaural panning. That's what gives you that sense of space, locality and immersion. But all that can be done while outputting a 2 channel mix. We don't really know much about the 3D Pulse headset, but I'm guessing the "special sauce" behind them is merely good sound staging, which is crucial to perceive sounds distinctly and in their own place in the mix.
Hope that was somewhat helpful, I try to not get overtly technical so it's understandable, but sometimes it can be difficult to convey it well on layman terms.