I have done the testing scenario you described above myself many times. The only difference is that I don’t stand 10 feet away from it. I only sit a few feet in front of it on a rotating chair.
When you said you detect slight changes when you rotate 360 degrees from the noise source, were you expecting to detect volume changes, or directionality changes?
In my test scenario, I fully could tell when I rotate 360 from the noise source whether the noise source is in front of me, on my side, or behind me. So in terms of directionality, I always know where the noise source is coming from, easily. If you cannot tell where the noise source is when you rotate 360, I don’t know why.
But it doesn’t have anything to do with the Full Directionality setting in Genie 2. Regardless of whether I’m in Automatic or Full Directionality or Pinna Omni setting in the Genie 2 Directionality Setting value, I can always tell where my noise source is located. That’s an “always on” situation.
Setting the Genie 2 Directionality Setting to Full Directionality simply means is that you’ll hear sounds in front of you more than sounds on the side and behind you. But that’s only in terms of volume, It has nothing to do with being able to tell where the sound comes from (which is always on).
So when I rotate 360 from my noise source, while I can always tell where my noise source is, I also detect slight changes in volume as I rotate 360, with the volume being the lowest when the noise source is behind me, and the loudest when in front of me. But you’re right that it’s only slight volume changes. It’s not significantly different.
But then I think maybe it’s not designed to be significantly different in volume, because remember that with the OPN, their philosophy is to open up the soundscape and let you hear everything around you in the first place. So maybe there’s a bias to let more surrounding sounds come in than how the pinna would have done it. I think the traditional HAs might have been more aggressive in blocking surrounding sounds while the OPN is less aggressive (by design because of its open paradigm).
If the pinna (and maybe traditional HAs) is more aggressive in directionally blocking surrounding sound to help improve speech (not by making a distinction between what’s noise and what’s speech, but simply by favoring sounds coming from the front, assuming that it’s speech, which may not necessarily be so) , the OPN takes a different approach by having a rebalanced the soundscape that consists of a Voice Activity Detector to differentiate between the various sound sources in its soundscape to know what’s noise and what’s speech to rebalance accordingly. Maybe the picture below helps explain it better.
The point is that even though the OPN doesn’t behave in terms of affecting directional volume the way you expect, as with how the pinna does it, it doesn’t really matter because the end goal of preserving speech (and clarifying it), no matter where it comes from, and minimizing noise sources, is still achieved, even if in a different way than how the pinna does it.
Edit: actually I just remember that I did the same test with the Sonic Enchant 100, which uses the more traditional directionality approach of blocking surrounding sounds except in the front. With the Enchant, I did feel more volume change as I rotate 360 compared to the OPN in Full Directionality mode. But not significantly more volume change, just a little bit more. And like the OPN, with the Enchant, I can always tell where the direction of any sound comes from.