Apple has added 3D Spatial Audio to the latest MacBook Pro and it's much better than you'd expect.
Enable Dolby Atmos, Lossless Audio, and Spatial Audio on Mac
Spatial Audio was born in the AirPods Pro. It’s Apple’s take on surround sound, but it can be used with all kinds of audio — not just movies, but music and even relaxing soundscaping apps. Using audio trickery, your headphones trick your brain into hearing sounds above, below, and behind you, as well as the usual left-to-right rumble we get from stereo. That makes perfect sense with headphones, but MacBooks only have small speakers bunched together near the keyboard.
“I find Spatial Audio to be a disruptive experience for anything originally recorded in stereo, but I’ve listened to a few classic recordings on Apple Music where the technology makes sense,” musician Jon Moore told Lifewire in a forum post. “I also agree… that it makes more sense with multimedia experiences like games and VR.”
When we listen to the real world, we can easily tell where a sound is coming from, how far away it is, and which way it is moving. We do all this with two ears and our brain. The brain is important because it processes the input from the ears and turns it into a 3D auditory image of the moment.
