the steam audio source component's 'directionality' toggle works and has since the beta; the extended featureset (reflections, occlusion, raytracing, etc.) have not been implemented yet

world devs can grab the official Unitypackage for Steam Audio and some parts of that component have been verified working in-game (directionality, the big one)
+ the steam audio beta ofc

i'm no audio engineer and have literally no formal experience in the field, but it does come a lot down to vrc's defaults and the horrible vrcspatialaudiosource on top of bad reverb/settings

tl;dr not enough knowledge or discussion happens rn on it to matter imo

don't think audio has had enough 'experimentation' in this space outside of projs like arc and stir and most haven't taken the time to fully study how it should work over 'it should *just* work' - lack of knowledge and improper usage are killing chances of really good implementations

been messing with some implementations of a mid-side setup with some new stir features, quite an interesting setup (and i see the appeal, now)

shameless plug to codeberg.org/mintea/stir for anyone additionally interested (:

yes.

it fluctuates between 25mb/s and 2mb/s, the dsl connection here is... "strong"
even on good days (+15mb/s) a couple months ago, rtspt was having some major issues in regards to audio artifacts on many 5.1 streams, but it's nice to see somehow it's mostly resolved :p

noted, i am experiencing some minor blips but nothing near as bad as it was a few months ago, and it's more than likely my 2mbps upload speed... lol
i'll keep testing setups and documenting what i can. anything more impactful, i'll bring it up in discord
thx for the recs (:

i follow the same OBS setup provided from the wiki, only change is setting track-1's bitrate to 800 within the output > audio tab

using rtspt, it tends to be wildly unstable where mpegts is fine

i'll see if i can grab some proper examples later and throw em in the discord srv, if that helps

i primarily noted this issue over vrcdn with track-specific bitrates over 320, otherwise rtspt was stable

pretty sure this was brought up once or twice in discord (not by me) regarding using arc and experiencing the same

it should be noted that RTSPT is probably not a good choice for low latency 5.1, and MPEG-TS is very recommended when using VRCDN to mitigate a lot of the glitchiness when streaming 5.1

you've got the idea, essentially if we can't have audio filters in Unity, we've gotta do them in pre-processing the stream

running an entire DAW just for this is kinda overkill, so STIR is a very lightweight OBS implementation