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When choosing a music streaming service, it's a close race between two in particular: Spotify Premium and Apple Music. Both services boast extensive catalogs and plenty of features, but there is a clear winner. Despite a recent price increase to $13 a month, Spotify is the best streaming service for most people. It offers the best mix of features, including lossless music, audiobooks, Spotify Connect streaming and great community offerings, such as Spotify Wrapped (now it's not just for the holidays). Spotify also offers the best free tier: Without paying a dime or providing a credit card numb

You can find Spatial Audio music on Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tidal. The spatial audio tracks are typically included in the lowest subscription tier, but of course this could change. You'll see icons near the albums or songs that support spatial audio, and there are usually spatial audio playlists to get a wide variety of songs to test your new gear. For which of those is the best option, check out Best Music Streaming Service of 2026.

While CNET's David Carnoy has tested spatial audio with the AirPods, I was interested to hear how the experience scaled up to a full home theater system. I regularly test Dolby Atmos playback in movies as part of my day-to-day work, but music in spatial audio is something different. I did some listening tests with a Marantz SR6013, an Apple TV 4K and a Klipsch 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos speaker setup. As with DVD-Audio and quadraphonic before it, the success of spatial music (i.e. Dolby Atmos Music) depends mostly on the quality of the mix itself. Every album since the late '60s has been mixed in stere

Spatial audio is Apple's term for a collection of audio technologies that bring 360-degree effects to video calls, TV shows, movies and remixed music. Apple first introduced spatial audio on its AirPods Pro earbuds in 2020, and most of its audio products and other hardware since then also support the tech.  When it comes to the spatial audio portion of Apple Music and streaming movies, this is supplied courtesy of Dolby Atmos. Atmos is a surround-sound standard used both in movie theaters and the home, and has also been used to remix albums. As long as the source is encoded for surround sound,