I was throughly impressed with Spatial Audio. If you listen to the version of the Blue Danube that is available in the Classical Playlist it is engineered so that if sounds like you are sitting at the piano bench. You can hear the locations of the keys being played and the strings being struck. Classical isn’t the only music affected positively. In the Country playlist the version of Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash was similar engineered so that you could hear the space between the instruments in the locations where they were traditionally located when performing that piece. In some of the music by Joji in his album Nectar they played around with the layering and spatially moved some of those layers around in addition to pushing certain instruments forward or back to make the track sound more like a live performance. Some of the tracks on After Hours by The Weekend almost sounded like remixes the reengineering was so strongly apparent. This is the major point. When it is well engineered a track will have the 3D quality of an analog recording but it will have the precision of digital. This is the value. Granted, if you aren’t accustomed to listening for these things and don’t care about the sound of the locations of, say, the lead guitars in a track by Lynyrd Skynyrd, then you won’t care about what Spatial Audio is doing. I, for one, however, am throughly impressed with what is possible while not always impressed with the execution. A lot rests on the shoulders of the engineers who make the decisions about how to implement this technology. A good engineer will do amazing things while a bad one will really mess up a track.
I have no comment on Lossless since I can’t afford the equipment to make it worth while. However, most humans can’t hear the higher and lower ranges the Lossless audio can produce, especially those of us older than 40. So, unless someone is nice and spends a few thousand dollars on my audio equipment for me, I’ll probably never know if there is any significant change in the audio experience.