Several months ago, I did a big switch from Spotify to Apple Music due to the savings from the Apple One bundle as I was already paying for other stuff like News+, iCloud separately. I do miss the quality and variety of playlists on Spotify, but as long as there are cost savings (~$20/mo), I think I can live without it. Plus, I ported all my Spotify playlists over anyway.
Apple Music offers the ability to listen in Spatial Audio in addition to lossless audio compression. However, Spatial Audio is only available for the most recent or higher-end AirPods models. I still have the old 1st generation AirPods so I don’t get to try it on-the-go.
In my home / office, I generally stream music (mostly sci-fi film scores during the day) to my Sonos One or Sonos Play:3 which also don’t seem to have Spatial Audio support.
Over the 1.5 years I’ve been on the Apple Silicon / M1 Macbook Air, I have rarely played music directly through the Air speakers, but out of curiosity, I started to just about a week ago. And wow, it actually sounds really good. Spatial Audio + Lossless can make a track come alive. You can feel like the music is coming from all around you.
I’ll be listening to music directly on my Air speakers a lot more. The M2 Air which at some point I’d like to upgrade to has a 4-speaker sound system as opposed to stereo and I’m curious how different that will sound.