Updated to iOS 16 thanks to this thread as a reminder
and ran the personalised spatial audio process. I have a fairly low threshold for AI shenanigans and will direct a stream of invective at a computer without much provocation. As there was none of that it must have gone pretty well. I guess the implicit challenge of managing better than the average ASR boomer helped with motivation.
And yes, it would be disappointing to go through it all as an apostate
then discover you need Apple Music, but as that's my main source, no drama here. No easy way to AB as others have noted but it sounds fine on AirPods Max. I basically use spatial audio for most everything as I dislike in-head soundstage, so I'm predisposed to like it.
Is it better than before? Absolutely. There's a palpable sense of palatableness, a tip-of-the-tongue "there" that's more there now than there then, an illuminated holographic "is" that transcends "was" or "if" or "why" or "why not" (also
Blood Supernova just made me jump out of my skin: how many dB up was that?) Am I absolutely sure? Absolutely not, what else can I say ...
Edit: forgot to say, iPhone (mine is 11 Max, so it's getting on in years) worked up a sweat scanning my ears. Throwing lots of those LiDAR dots at my pinnae I expect.