[dahauns]

>AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups.

The audio experience itself, sure - "Want high-end audio without breaking the bank and remodeling your room? Get a pair of decent headphones." has been sound (heh) advice for decades.

The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet. I mean, on paper, they have the ingredients - (personalized) HRTF and head tracking. But in practice I found even the personalized HRTF somewhat underwhelming, and knowing what's possible from the VR world the gap is still significant (IMO the Valve Index off-ear solution is still the pinnacle in immersive positional audio without surround speakers, even without personalization of the HRTF, I haven't really tested the AVP implementation yet, though) - which leads me to second, IMO even larger issue:

Extremely limited usage scenarios. For the living room, it's basically just supported Apps/content on AppleTV. Compared to the reality of a standard AVR (or even just Soundbar) plus surround speakers setup - take any multichannel input (LPCM, DD, DTS MA, Atmos you name it) and output surround sound - that's...just not a substitute. And that's not even getting into latency issues with gaming/interactivity (a general BT issue, though, at least it's slowly improving...).

[crazygringo]

> The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet.

I dunno -- I find it much better than actual speakers.

With Atmos on the AirPods Pro, I can pinpoint the location of an instrument within about 5°. It's astonishing.

Whereas with the traditional 5.1 speaker setup... you definitely get the sense of center vs. side, and kind of a couple of "zones" in between, but I can never place the location of an instrument or sound as accurately as I can with the AirPods Pro. It's a much more diffuse directionality, rather than "it's coming from exactly there".

Plus, of course, I get to take my surround-sound music and audio everywhere. Not just my living room. So I don't know what "extremely limited usage scenarios" you're talking about? I mean, yes it needs to come through an Apple device, but that's all my media anyways.

[dahauns]

Yeah, I guess it will always be partly subjective (or I guess even actually different from person to person depending on how well the personalization works for specific ears), but...I never got that kind of precision when I tested the Pro 2. It's been years since I tested them (20..22? The pro 2 were brand new.), mind you, so my experience is from memory.

Music actually worked quite good regarding positioning (and yeah, to get that kind of precision from speakers they'll have to be well positioned, room calibrated and any strong flaws in room acoustics corrected, otherwise phase info is all over the place and it gets as muddled as you describe) - but there still was noticable coloring of the sound that didn't go away after recalibration. And TBH that's more important for me with music.

Where I sadly wasn't blown away was movies with full Atmos - especially height channel stuff I would have hoped to be significantly better than old-school HRTF...but it wasn't really (well, apart from the tracking, of course, which is cool).

The usage scenarios though...well, basically everything not an AppleTV 4k I can connect to an AVR, i.e. BluRay, TV/SetTop boxes, HTPC, and my personal biggie: any kind of gaming device (including the aforementioned PC). From what I've read, at least the app compatibility with spatial audio on ATV4k has gotten better ('bout time, Amazon!), but several european streaming providers still don't seem to work (e.g. Sky, Dazn) Spatial audio on the go is admittedly not a priority for me, though