True. At home, at best, you get an artfully assembled sonic tableau ahead of you, with width, some illusion of height, maybe some hint of depth. Nothing like the real-world 360-degree soundscape you know is all around you.
I suppose this could come down to each of our perception of the same thing, and how we'd describe it. But I feel like I often get more than a hint of depth.
Sometimes it can really give me a sense of hearing something from a great distance away. I even find some orchestral recordings to sound somewhat "convincing" if I meet the illusion part way.
Also, if we are talking about creating the sensation of hearing through a hall to an orchestra playing, in one sense surround sound certainly has advantages - it's often touted that you can be surrounded by the ambience of the hall acoustic (sent to the sides/rear etc speakers) and in that way enter the space in a more realistic fashion than stereo.
But I don't find stereo to be THAT far behind. For one, with the right recording the entire room behind my speakers seems to melt away, the orchestra having a large spread between the speakers and even the back corners of the soundstage can seem to spread out far wider than the speakers. If I just imagine myself listening from the right distance, then the scale of the orchestra seems correct. What about immersion in the acoustic? I get that kind of effect too. Not by sending the hall acoustics to surround speakers, but more like melding the acoustic of my room with that of the recording. So if I play with reflectivity (I can shift around curtains, diffusors) when I get it just right the hall acoustics in the recording will sort of bleed in to or merge in to the room acoustics. The sensation then is that I am essentially sharing the same acoustic space with the orchestra, there isn't a listening through a portal effect to a different space, there is a "listening through a large acoustic space" to the orchestra.
I have surround too and listen to it a lot and I really don't find my stereo immersion lags behind much at all (and generally I find it better - the imaging is more precise and corporeal). I mentioned this in another thread I think, but I recently had an audiophile friend over listening and he was shocked, almost felt like I'd done some sort of magic trick on him, the sound was so capacious and vivid.
Yet people seem really happy to watch TV that way. A small rectangle ahead of them, with an artfully assembled tableau on it. Nothing like the real world visual space all around them. If one thing is inadequate, why isn't the other thing?
Speaking of TV...which got me to thinking of movie images actually...and the subject of illusions...
I discovered a neat trick when I was a teenager: Personal 3D at the movies. I discovered you can make a movie become 3 dimensional without the glasses.
Just by closing one eye.
It's a really weird thing. And it works best on big screen images (works very well on my projected image too). You close one eye and at first the image looks a bit odd because...well...you are using one eye. And it looks flat. But keep staring. As you do, over, say, a minute or so, you will start to see more and more depth in the image, expanding like you are donning 3D glasses...and frankly even better...it just starts to take on an almost real life look and depth! It can be utterly amazing on the right images.
I surmise that what's happening is when you close one eye you of course lose one of your main methods of perceiving depth - stereo vision. So your brain goes "hold on, what's going on here?" And, having lost the stereo cues the brain tries to understand the image in front of you and starts relying on all the other depth cues - the shading, the lines of perspective etc...to try to re-construct how far away things are. In the same way that if you close one eye you lose *some* depth perception, but it's not like everything actually looks like it's flat, 2 dimensional and up against your nose.
Anyway...fun trick sometimes. Not really the way I would want to watch full movies though. I still actually do it sometimes on my imac 5K monitor, watching 4K videos and such. If there is a vivid image of someone talking and I close one eye, within about a minute it can feel startlingly like there is no screen and I'm looking at a person right in front of me.