Personally the generic HRTF doesn’t work for me at all. When they try to put a sound above me it sounds like I have a cold. For video games I can learn that ‘sounds like I have a cold’ means ‘the sound source is above me’ but it is not natural.
Since I don’t hear the spatial effect, spatial processing for headphones just vandalizes the sound for me.
I love surround sound in movies and music but I need to have all the speakers. My take is that surround for music has gotten worse in the past 20 years for a few reason, one that modern surround layouts for movies often lack rear channels and ‘quad’ reco4ding really expect rear channels. The first surround system I had (a cheap HTIB) did a great job decoding 1970s funk and classic rock recordings into surround with Dolby pro logic ii, but I think later upmixers are worse even on better equipment.
