What profound conceptual shift defines the breakthrough that powers the current era of spatial audio?

The sound could exist independently of the speaker

The core innovation underlying modern immersive audio, driven by the object-based paradigm, is a philosophical and technical departure from previous methodologies. Older systems required a direct mapping—if you wanted sound from the left rear, you needed a speaker in the left rear position assigned that channel. The breakthrough arrived with the computational realization that positional information could be treated as abstract metadata, allowing the *sound* element to be defined spatially without being rigidly tied to a specific physical transducer. This independence permits tremendous flexibility; the sound object's intended location remains constant, but the playback system intelligently determines the best way to reproduce that location given its unique set of available speakers, allowing for true scalability.