In my experience, the majority of tracks that are "mastered for spatial audio" sound absolutely terrible when played on actual surround speakers. Most of the so

In my experience, the majority of tracks that are "mastered for spatial audio" sound absolutely terrible when played on actual surround speakers. Most of the sound is on the center and the two front channels, it's probably similar to the stereo mix except with vocals on the center. The other channels get a slight reverb that sounds completely automatically generated. This sounds okay when mixed back down to stereo for headphones; there's a certain airiness that can be pleasing, but that's it. In an expensive Mercedes, I'd expect proper spatial audio with separate speakers for separate channels and it to sound maybe not quite as bad as in a home theater setting, but nearly. Unless these masters get significantly better I'll just stick to the stereo mix duplicated on other channels. The one exception to the rule above that I've experienced was some song by Billie Eilish. I didn't enjoy the music, but the mastering was excellent: they took care to actually move the location of sounds around that didn't interfer with the music.