It's possible to achieve speaker-based immersive (3D) audio in many PC games that don't seem to be supported by current proprietary object-based audio technologies using some tinkering and a technology called Ambisonics. Since Ambisonics seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the consumer-space so far, I will first explain what it is, what its benefits are, what content is available right now, and how to set it up on a PC for gaming.
Many should be familiar with multi-channel audio based on discrete speaker feeds or the more recent object-based audio. Ambisonics uses neither of these approaches. Instead, it describes a continous full-sphere sound field around a single point in space. A so called Ambisonics decoder uses this information in combination with a decoding matrix, which is specific to a given speaker layout, to reproduce this sound field a