I haven't been on Neogaf for a while, I've been really busy with work.
So here is my problem with this, I have had electronic components with coil whine, specifically my current nvidia gpu has it and I have had a dell laptop with it in the past. My current Onkyo amp also had some coil whine especially when it was warming up.
I was actually not going to bother with either next gen consoles and was going to wait, I then realized my foolishness and went to try and find one and it was sold out everywhere, I however got very lucky on the 2nd wave of pre-orders one of the online retailers had it and I managed to order from them with no issue, they had a delivery charge and I had to get an extra controller, but that is fine I usually always get a minimum 2 controllers anyway.
Hearing coil whine is likely dependent on age. The younger you are the more likely that you will hear it, if you are younger than 30 your audio range (frequency you can hear audio) is at its best and it then begins to degrade, if your above 40 you are less likely to be bothered by it or even hear it especially if it is high pitched.
With this said I must be one of the other lucky ones, my ps5 arrived I read some of the threads here with dread about connecting external drives and random consoles bricking in sleep mode. I bought an external Samsung T7 1TB USB SSD I backed off my ps4 pro prior and turned on my ps5 for the first time, it was so quiet I thought it was faulty I could not hear fan noise I could not hear anything. I work with computers all day, I was expecting some sort of noise. I was just so damn surprised at how quiet it was I put my ear next to it trying to hear something I could not hear a thing from it. I was worried something was wrong with it. I restored my user settings and my game saves, didn't restore any of the actual games from the backup, re-purposed the usb drive as extended external storage left it plugged in, left the console to use sleep mode essentially just enabled everything I figured if its going to go wrong better to go wrong now rather than later. Everything has worked perfectly, not a single issue with it, completely silent. Ive had maybe 2 crashes, 1 very early on actual os level crash and the 2nd was a game crash, other than that its been amazing.
Now my problem with your issue is this:
I have a Dolby Atmos/home cinema setup so headphones arnt really a viable option for me. Swapped the plug over direct to the socket no change.
You are telling us you can hear coil whine with a "Dolby Atmos / Home cinema" setup ? This is the point where I call bullshit.
Unless that coil whine is being amplified through your speakers, which would then point to serious grounding issues, there is no way you would being hearing it with a complete surround sound setup.
I have read through this thread and was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but 3 consoles all with terrible coil whine, so loud you can hear it through your sound system ? Either you are a bat with incredible hearing or I call bullshit.
Either way it doesn't matter, I would honestly suggest that you sell your PS5 there are plenty of people on here that would buy it off of you. You can probably make some money off of it on ebay, whatever essentially if you are having genuine issues after 3 returns and you were lucky enough to get 2 consoles sent out to you when people are still struggling to find 1 to buy, then its time to sell.
Your game collection can still be played on your ps4. I suggest you stick with your Xbox SX for this generation and leave your ps4 to play ps4 games, maybe in a few years Sony might do a PRO or they will probably create a slim edition you can then pick one up if you so desire.