Is the seated-centered solo listening to music a dated tech?

Absolutely not and never will be. If you want home theater multi channel / surround / atmos - those are "effects" IMHO and are based off of the stereo foundation.

Those have there place for home theater and if that’s what one likes, cool. It’s all subjective of course.

Again, those are effects and are way more "unnatural" IMHO to listen to music. I don’t care for it. A superbly setup 2chnl creates some of those multichannel "effects" naturally and is the standard.

For 2chnl, when you get right down to it, there can only be one single main listening position - the sweet spot - its physics. That sweet spot (larger - smaller) is system/setup/room/acoustic dependent.

Let me know when you grow more than 2 ears.

You can identify a number of sounds/loudspeakers greater than your number of ears. If you go to a choir, for example, you can hear many voices singing and also hear the lady talking to her husband sitting behind you. You can also hear a single voice or a single speaker using both ears, unless you are deaf in one ear.

If I correctly understand what you’re saying, JohnK, then, yeah. I can easily imagine systems in the future comprised of 30 or 40 or more "sound generating devices" spread around the periphery of a space, maybe wall and/or ceiling mounted. They’ll be of some future technology that energizes the air to create the compression/rarefaction that is sound without the need for a moving mass driver. The amplification electronics will precisely measure and deliver to each device the exact amount of energy and frequency to create real performance presence. I’m not being glib as I don’t doubt we’ll get there and when we do people will look back at our chunky speakers with their moving diaphragms and dumb amps and pity us and wonder why we’d even try to reproduce music that way. But we’re not there yet.

@surfcat Actually, we may be closer than you think. Not sure if you’ve heard of the BACCH technology, but it looks pretty impressive and those who’ve heard it have been pretty amazed (apparently it works wonders with headphones too). And it’s already available in several product forms from a company named Theoretical…
https://www.theoretica.us/bacch-dsp/

Heres some info on its development and technology at Princeton. Interesting stuff.
https://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/PureStereo/Pure_Stereo.html

I’d love to demo this at some point.

@redlenses03, I'm not talking about home theater, at least not as we envision it today but, rather, a truly transformative evolution in the collection and reproduced presentation of audio information that will undoubtedly happen given enough time and technological advancement.  We didn't always have stereo.  Adding separate low frequency devices already takes us out of the purely 2 speaker configuration to sometimes great benefit.  I also absolutely agree that a really good home theater audio set up is at best a mediocre to poor music audio system.  They may both like water, but one is fish and one is a duck.  quack quack