I think the problem is more that people's ear shapes are pretty different, and the exact way that sound coming from a specific direction presents itself is diff

I think the problem is more that people's ear shapes are pretty different, and the exact way that sound coming from a specific direction presents itself is different for every person - so you pretty much need a different profile (HRTF [1]) for every person to make them accurately hear sound coming from specific directions. I played around with those a while ago since it makes a pretty large difference in the realism of positional audio (both for surround video and for games). For me especially for differentiating between sound coming from in front of and from behind me. But I never really got it to work globally. [2] has a list of 50 different HRTFs. Only ~5 of them manage to make the sound come from in front of me correctly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable_system_wide_hrtf_with_pulseaudio/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable...