Do AirPods Pro have multiple drivers in each ear to simulate the environment, or is it all just done with head tracking and downmixed to stereo with some snazzy psychoacoustics?
It’s my understanding that Apple Music doesn’t actually even use the binaural downmixing instructions that can be encoded into Atmos music tracks, and uses its own algorithm, in a very “Apple knows best” kind of way. I would rather this be, at the very least, something that’s a setting — although as someone who’s never had any real luck hearing even the best true binaural recordings as really “spatial,” it probably wouldn’t make much difference to me either way.
The best way to listen to Atmos-encoded music on Apple Music is with an Apple TV connected to a good multichannel home theater system, in my experience. It didn’t convince me that it was the Future Of Music (tm), but some of it did sound pretty good.
