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Spatial audio is one of the hottest technologies on the market, and it’s slowly making its way to more people. Google promised to bring spatial audio to its Pixel phones in Android 13, and the feature finally landed.
In case you don’t know, spatial audio is a technology to achieve higher immersion in your music. Basically, when you have spatial audio-enabled headphones, the audio will change as you turn your head. It’s to make it sound like you’re in the middle of the concert or studio that the music is taking place in.
The latest Android 13 QPR brought spatial audio to the Pixel 6
This feature didn’t come with the official release of the operating system. Rather, it came with the latest QPR that was released a few days ago, according to 9To5Google. After installing this release, when you go to the Bluetooth settings for any audio device, you’ll see a toggle for the feature.
What’s impressive about this is the fact that it’s applied to any pair of bluetooth headphones/earbuds, not just the Pixel Buds Pro. This means that the phone is going to have to use some software wizardry to achieve this effect.
But don’t get too excited
If you installed the latest QRP, and you’re looking forward to using the spatial audio feature on your Pixel 6, then you’re going to be a bit disappointed. When you enable the feature, there’s no difference in the actual audio.
Google hasn’t released any statements as to why, but it might be because this feature is still very new. We need to wait for more software developers to implement the spatial audio into their apps. This means that we’ll gradually see more apps support this technology. We can’t deny that this process would be faster if we were talking about iPhones, however.
In any case, it’s exciting to see spatial audio coming to Pixel phones. We’re not sure if this feature is going to trickle to older Pixel phones. We know that the Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 also have Android 13, but Google, understandably, holds some of its best features for the latest and greatest phones.