[fxtentacle]

In my opinion, the problem is not Atmos, it's the lack of head-tracking. That's why it can sound awesome on a calibrated surround speaker setup but usually fails to deliver on headphones.

I once built a wwise plugin that allows you to play Atmos and the likes on a Oculus with proper Headphone Surround 3D and everyone agreed that it was fantastic. But those consumer $0.01 ASICs integrated into mainboards obviously can't compete with a solution that has more sensors and GHz of compute available.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Don't Apple headphones/earbuds have spatial audio headtracking enabled by default? I think it even works with Apple TV (not just phones/laptops)

[fxtentacle]

Yes, and some people love it. But the AirPods don't have enough processing power so they need to send the measurements to the host via bluetooth and then the adjusted audio is sent back later. The result is 200+ ms of latency on the head-tracking which is much larger than the perception threshold at 30ms.

[basisword]

I don’t notice any latency issue generally. But, if you change your heads “default position” (i.e. instead of looking forward most of the time you’re now looking out the window next to you most of the time) it does take quite a few seconds to readjust and find the middle.