[noahadavis]

Sorry, but I completely disagree. If what you were saying was true, then physical synths would have the same problems in live performances. I think the problem is not the instrument, but rather how people are used to using the instrument. If you're used to mixing synths for stereo, then your ideas for how to make a synth sound good beyond stereo are much weaker.

Also, there's so much you can do to the sound of a synth and so many powerful synths out there. If you're complaining about the sound being too smooth or simple, you just haven't played around with powerful synths often enough.

[lux]

I was giving an anecdote, yo. Calm down. Synths in the digital environment of a spatial audio engine, which I've done work in both programmatically and as a musician/sound engineer, has problems with spatializing the unnatural waveforms that synths produce. Humans have trouble pinpointing where those sounds are coming from. It's easy to work around, and no one is saying "don't use synths in spatial audio", just that there are considerations to be made to make them work well in that environment. Just like you don't want to pre-apply reverb because that's going to be generated by the spatial engine.

Here's a link with a bit about sine waves, but I've found the same to be true (to a lesser extend) with saw, triangle, and square waves too.

https://developer.oculus.com/learn/audio-intro-sounddesign