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> Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience)

I literally have no idea what you're talking about.

Using Spatial Audio on my AirPods Pro is insanely better, and still very much spatial, even without actively moving my head.

First, the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears -- no "headphone fatigue". It's vastly more comfortable and realistic.

Second, while dialog comes from straight ahead, sound effects like doors opening, cars honking etc. clearly come from angles, and things like wind come from all around, like an actual surround sound experience.

Third, because the dialog tracks are separated from other sounds spatially, the dialog is easier to understand as well. I used to sometimes put on subtitles for certain material to understand fully in normal stereo -- I never have to anymore with spatial audio.

> Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech

I've used all that old tech too, and for whatever reason Apple's spatial audio is leagues better. I'm not sure if it's something about being optimized for known headphone characteristics, or the head tracking, or something clever with the inward-facing microphones, or all of the above, but it's nothing like that old tech.

> now want to work backwards into what it may be useful for.

It's useful for listening, end of story. I'm honestly mystified why you think it's a gimmick. I can't even imagine going back to listening to movies and TV without it. (I project from my iPad onto a screen, connect my AirPods Pro, and it's basically like being in an actual cinema, but without waking anyone else up at night from booming surround sound.)

> the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears

It’s a pity that Apple doesn’t provide that feature as a simple option that one can apply to any audio source.

It gets activated on any audio source in a surround sound format, it can’t be applied to stereo sources because stereo audio doesn’t contain any positional info

It’s possible to apply Dolby Headphone (or similar systems) to any stereo signal, to get rid of the “in your head” sound.

Can you offer a good example video? I’ve done some binaural recording in the past, but my reaction so far to Apple’s spatial audio has been… kinda meh.

I remember the first thing I tried when it came out was the first episode of See on the Apple TV+ app. It's a great showcase for it.

It's sci-fi drama so has a lot of really immersive audio, Apple TV+ supports spatial audio, and the first episodes of Apple's series are free so it's easy to try.

Try toggling the Spatial Audio option as you're watching to really get a sense of the difference. It's huge.

Most of the content on Disney+ sounds great in my experience. The Guardians of the Galaxy 2 intro scene is a good demo scene.

Hamilton on Disney+ is my go-to to test/show off spatial audio. It really does sound like the audio is coming from specific places on the stage.

I think most of what you're saying applies to 3D TV, too. And that ended up being a dud. IMO the problem with both is that they're an awful shared experience, and a lot of TV watching is done by more than one person at a time.

It's weird because I've had the BEST experience with apple in terms of shared experiences. I go to share audio on my iphone, then I share with my wifes airpods. Seems to work fine.

Everyone is different, I suppose. A shared TV watching experience where we're both plugged into our own isolated audio and can't hear each other talk would be an awful experience for me.

Not only is everyone different, but we have different needs at different times. My partner and I use shared audio infrequently, but when we need it, we need it.

Our use case is watching something together in bed while the kids are going to sleep. We put our AirPods Pro in “Transparent” mode, which allows us to converse with each other just fine.

To say that “Your Mileage May Vary” would be putting it mildly. I accept that this feature may not be useful for you, in exactly the same way that Dark Mode in IOS is not useful for me, but seems to have its fans.

> and can't hear each other talk

That's what transparency mode is for. You can hear each other perfectly.

You don't need noise cancellation as much when you're at home. It's more for the subway, planes, etc.

Actually apple has a setting for this (at least on the pro's) which is called transparency. Works surprisingly well.

You get the TV / movie audio in ear, and then any other audio from outside.

We use it to keep an ear out for kids (bathroom breaks / falls off bed or whatever) and to chat with each other.

But yes - some people do hate apple products - so different uses I think for different folks.

My one MAJOR complaint is the volume of the mode switch sound on these things is way way too loud! Perhaps there is a setting for that I haven't found. Bong! in the ear is super annoying. Make it a click or something.

3D has tons of drawbacks though -- the image is less than half as bright, glasses are clunky and not used for anything else, there's still serious ghosting effects. It's really half-baked, alas. Also there's only a tiny fraction of content in 3D. (The best way to view 3D movies, funnily enough, is in a virtual theater on the Oculus Quest 2.)

Spatial audio is different. It has zero downsides over existing headphones, and nearly all movies and TV episodes are mastered in 5.1 so the source signal is everywhere.

And it's not meant for a shared experience. That's what actual surround speakers in your living room are for. But these days tons of movies and TV are consumed privately with headphones, and so spatial audio simply recreates a similar surround experience on the headphones you're already using.

So I think it's pretty different -- just a pure positive upgrade. It doesn't have tradeoffs like 3D does.

> (The best way to view 3D movies, funnily enough, is in a virtual theater on the Oculus Quest 2.)

I don't deny the drawbacks of stereoscopic 3D—even as a personal 3D fan, I'm not surprised it never caught on—but I don't think a VR headset is the best way to consume stereoscopic content. Because, well, you have to wear a headset!

I have a BenQ W1070 projector which supports stereoscopic 3D, and a Valve Index. For actual VR content, the Index is great, but for normal stereoscopic movies, using just the projector with a pair of special glasses is much more comfortable.

I do wish enabling 3D didn't dull the colors on the projector, but it's still clearly preferable to a headset IMO.

Oh sure I wasn't referring to comfort, just to the pure quality of the 3D experience.

A VR headset is the only solution I'm aware of that is full-brightness, zero-ghosting.

Ghosting, maybe, although I almost never notice it on my projector.

But, isn't "full brightness" just a function of how bright you make the projector? Which is to say, you could make a projector that's twice as bright as mine (mine isn't amazing, it cost less a a grand) and in 3D it would have the brightness of my 2D setup.

In theory, but there are good reasons why cinemas and home projectors don't "just" double (or really, need to quadruple because of how the shutters work).

Heat dissipation requirements go up hugely because the bulb is so much hotter.

You simply can't buy a home projector that is 4x brighter. I looked into it earlier this year -- they simply don't exist.

Because if they did, the fan noise required to cool the bulb would be so loud you wouldn't even be able to hear the movie.

However, a lot of advances are being made with both laser and LED "bulbless" projectors... so it might actually be coming in the not-so-far future.

You could also have multiple projectors. :) Or a bright TV.

Does anyone happen to know of a non-headphone-specific solution for this, which actually does a good job? It doesn't need to work when I move my head, neither does the Virtual Barbershop[1] and yet the effect on my run-of-the-mill earbuds is still incredible.

I'm open to little hardware boxes, software that modifies my computer's audio as it plays, a filter for ffmpeg, etc, as long as I can use whatever headphones I want and the spatial effect is high quality.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

I've tried a bunch of them over the years, heck way back when there was an analog box you could buy that did it.

And there are still a ton -- heck, there's a checkbox built-in in VLC under Audio Effects > Filter > Headphone virtualization.

But none of them that I've tried come anywhere close to what Apple has done. I don't know why.

However, there is an official Dolby Atmos Surround Sound effect for Windows 10:

https://www.howtogeek.com/309853/how-to-use-dolby-atmos-surr...

I've never tried it, but if anything currently competes decently with Apple's version, that might be it.

> I do wonder if in the longer term if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content i.e. a gimmick.

For what it's worth, I have a pair of Audeze headphones that has 3D head tracking or whatever they call it, and I don't think it's a gimmick.

When I'm wearing those and watching a movie on my TV (or playing a game on my PC), the sound really does appear to be coming from in front of me (or beside/behind me depending on the channel or the mix), and if I turn my head, the sound stays put.

It's somewhat subtle, but it can make me forget that I'm wearing headphones and I personally find it really adds to the experience.

Why is that useful though? "It's like I'm really listening to a TV!". Isn't that what people try to avoid with expensive sound systems that offer surround sound?

With the AirPods + Apple TV content spatial audio makes it sound like the audio is coming through more than just the two channels. It's much more natural sounding that stereo in headphones.

I find positional audio is more immersive.

I never claimed this was useful, I said I found it enjoyable and having had this headset for 3+ years now, I can say that - speaking for myself - this is not a "gimmick" that I've grown tired of or turned off.

The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well.

Instead they’d just find a way to make the battery bigger because they know people care a ton about that.

Also, everyone keeps talking about consciously moving your head around. Record yourself doing something on your computer for 5 minutes and watch how much your head already, unconsciously moves around. It’s a lot.

Yes it’s subtle, but it’s supposed to be. You’re meant to forget about it. It’s trying to more accurately reproduce our natural abilities.

> The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well.

Force Touch.

It's working very well on iPhones and Apple Watches and has great use cases. It was axed on newer iPhones because of discoverability issues and little amount of people being even aware it exists and how to use it.

I still miss force touch on keyboard to move cursor around (instead of pressing spacebar, holding it and waiting)

The fascinating thing about this spatial audio wave to me is that it was basically available almost a decade ago (because "binaural audio" has been available and fairly trivially usable for a while now).

I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued spatial audio experiences (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).

I think the key thing has been enough processing for dynamic/real time spatial audio via HRTF. Despite being “just” audio, applying a HRTF can be pretty processing intensive, especially for a mobile device. Those binaural audio experiences were all pre-computed.

Binaural audio recordings are usually made with a Binaural microphone that records sound in a similar configuration to how human ears work. Or they're just synthesized directly as a stereo signal (that's usually how those "binaural beats" music is made). They're nothing more than a stereo file, and the audio has just been recorded in a certain way that mimics the human ear and head. This is why the virtual surround sound from binaural recordings sounds so convincing, but only when wearing headphones.

Spatial audio is a more generalized term. Let's say you're filming an action movie and have a scene where a robot comes from foreground-right, kicks a car, and the car flies over the camera and makes a loud crashing sound behind the camera. You can't just stick a binaural microphone on set and record that because it's almost all CGI. There is no actual sound of a robot kicking a car to be recorded. Instead your foley artists and sound design team will record and modify dozens (even hundreds) of sound sources and combine them together in software that supports a sort of virtual 3d environment, and save it in a format capable of representing this (like Dolby Atmos).

You can then take that Dolby Atmos data and in realtime compute how to map your virtual sound-sources onto things like a 64-speaker Dolby Atmos array in an movie theater, or a 12-speaker home theater Dolby Atmos setup, or apply an HRTF to convincingly map that audio to 2 headphones. A Binaural audio signal is restricted to stereo and intended to be placed directly in the ears.

TIL, thanks for the explainer.

The most important thing about spatial audio in AirPods is that they have head tracking, and so sound will appear to be coming from the same places if you move your head around. It doesn't work nearly as well without that.

This Apple Music “spatial audio” just means Dolby Atmos. It is not the same gyroscope-based spatial audio that they use on Apple TV.

Apple TV doesn’t have Spacial Audio. Only iPads and iPhones.

Apple TV the streaming service. Not Apple TV the hardware or Apple TV the app or any other Apple TV that apple makes.

The streaming service is Apple TV+ while the App is TV and the device is called Apple TV.

https://dcurt.is/apple-tv-all-the-way-down

In theory they could apply the gyroscope based movement to Dolby Atmos based music as well. But who wants to turn 90 degrees left and have the songs soundstage not also shift with them?

It's really difficult (almost impossible) to keep your head perfectly still.

Indeed, so you're getting degradation/distortion of the audio source most of the time. That's why most people try it a couple of times then turn it off.

I'm not sure agreeing with my point backs up what you're saying.

I'm saying we turn our heads regularly, so the Spatial audio works well most of the time.

I am agreeing that you cannot keep your head completely still, and then pointing out that that fact means Spatial Audio is constantly causing audio adjustments with seemingly no basis which degrades the listening experience.

The argument that Spatial Audio makes more tiny adjustments is an argument against Spatial Audio, not an argument for it.

Why do you think it degrades the listening experience?

The mixes are already made for surround sound. It's not arbitrary, so not "no basis" like you say. It's taking a surround mix and anchoring the audio sources.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I turned it off not because of any degradation/distortion, but because the tracking wasn’t that great (on multiple fairly recent devices) and one ‘hiccup’ where you move your head but the audio sticks in place is a bigger minus than any plus from the spatial audio itself.

> I do wonder … if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content…

But first, back in 1972, there was Quadrophonic. Twice as good as stereo!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadraphonic_sound