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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

Who is asking for spatial audio mixes? Is there any demand for this or is Apple pushing it for corporate reasons? To my ears, the spatial mixes are an interesting gimmick, but the audio quality sounds worse than the "HD" (or whatever they are called) mixes. Personally, I'm just happy with CD quality streams - I'm not able to hear differences with anything higher quality than that, but I can often (but not always) tell the difference with lower quality streams.

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I imagine it's seen as a value-add by Apple and Dolby. Studios are forking off massive sums to build-out Atmos rigs. A savvy artists may ask for it because it helps you on Apple Music.

As for the consumer experience, I feel like Benn Jordan's video from earlier last year does a good job of explaining the situation and its current limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dw3aKbw5Wo

Yes - I saw that video! Reaffirms my belief that it's really just Apple pushing this.

I also find it really annoying as it keeps wanting to push me into a mode where it is doing "head tracking" with "spatial audio" based on the location of my phone, as if the location of my phone has any meaning at all to me when I am listening to music (or even "watching" video as I am likely trying to do some activity at the same time or why the hell am I using my phone?!).

Agreed, i've only ever turned it off, why would I want L and R to swap when I turn around? maybe if it was realtime i wouldn't notice it but with airpods at least there's a noticeable delay in the mix catching up to your movement

It's not meant for situations where you spin around constantly, but it works really well when you're sitting down.

Head tracking can be disabled along with spatial audio enabled. Spatial audio is a theoretically great feature even in now with proper mastering, but I think head tracking is an optional feature that's prepared for AR.

My take is that Apple’s prepping to have some chock-full content streams for when the Vision Pro or its successors become more mainstream, so that Spatial Audio can become part of the draw for using those devices.

I also suspect this is a big part of the reason they developed Spatial Audio in the first place.

a lot of "spatial mixes" are outright bad.

And my guess is the apple vision pro team and corporate leadership are asking for it, because they're still trying to figure out why it exists.

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