Pick your poison...2-channel or multi?

Greetings Cdwallace;

First my apologies as I'm currently well outside your budget of ten thousand dollars, didn't read your initial post before responding.

While I'm sure we could all spend more to obtain that next best component or upgrade, whats important to me may not be important to you or others.

Fair enough, now in terms of whats important to me in the context of my system and its overall performance relating to both movies as well as multichannel...

Full range sound with appropriate dynamic scale for both musical content as well as the movie effects...

To keep the main channels, center channel and surrounds cone driver properties identical along with amplification for final voicing for seamless surround....

A wide dispersion speaker for various listening positions off axis very conducive to hometheatre minus the penalties of sweet spots...About all I feel it gives up are pinpoint imaging and perhaps it doesn't reach the heavens in uppermost frequencies the way a ribbon Magneplaner will...Although separation and general location of performers is rendered complete..

Plenty of Quality power on tap along with plenty of cone drivers to handle the power and deliver proper SPLs, Plenty of headroom available for dynamics...And with two Bag End 18 in. subs along with a Mirage BPS400 for .1 effects....

The performance really speaks for itself and is really a must here for final listener dependant specifics, but safe to say in my world it truly satisfies with excellent renditions of performers playing , instrumental tones along with what I feel is tremendous dynamic shading, suspending disbelief, allowing you to really become immersed in the recorded event, be it multichannel movies, concerts or two channel listening.
The combination of tubes in my sources and Plinius amplification are almost magical and very satisfying never imparting any sense of fatigue. System involvement takes on a new level as many instances it becomes hard to remove yourself from the afternoons playback, turning it off almost induces a feeling of regret.
Now with that being said this system is a labor of love on my part that took many countless hours of research, auditioning at various dealers, and final tweaking of speaker placement, tubes nos, interchanging and mixing of cables, powerline conditioning, etc... and is very much a sum of all the parts synergisticly performing as one to achieve my desired results. Not to mention the cost which incidentally was substantial as I prefer buying new, knowing very well I wont be letting any of this go. Hows it sound?

Very musically satisfying as well as involving, TREMENDOUS!!!

Regards /// Tim W... ///

No brainer....2 channel. Multi-channel is great for movies, not so good for music, IMHO.

Thanks JMC

I would've guessed no brain..er, as well!

Enjoy

I've done a lot of thinking and research on this subject.

There are different formats of multi channels.
Generally two different kinds

1. DPL, DPLII(x), Trified by Meridian, Logic 7 by Lexicon, etc..., which from the two channel source, ie. Redbook CD, generates multi channels.

2. SACD, DAD-Audio which are music sources recorded multichannel to begin with.

I started with multi channel music in mind, and I'm a kind of guy like simple solutions. I picked Meridian as the center of my system. Now I have 561M and 861V2, but I'm going back to 2ch for music listening becuase,

First I don't have much SACD & DVD-Audio sources... I'll probably not have much for a while... but I have hundreds of redbook CD sources.

Secondly, while Trifield and DPLII are nice and have it's own merits, however it's not necessary better than pure 2 ch stereo.
- Trifield/DPLII provide great imaging effect and sense of filling the space.
- Stereo feels more natural and smooth.

I guess with the right setup, I think you can get either by either format.

Thirdly, to have really good multi channel system with matching 5-7 speakers, amps, cables etc, it cost more than double...

Thus within a certain budget, I concluded that I better concentrate on 2ch for music listening in my case.

"Secondly, while Trifield and DPLII are nice and have it's own merits, however it's not necessary better than pure 2 ch stereo.
- Trifield/DPLII provide great imaging effect and sense of filling the space.
- Stereo feels more natural and smooth."

That statement is completely opposite of my experience.

Have you customized your trifields for differnt types of music?

If your 2 channel sounds more natural than the triield, change the trifield setting until they sound the same as your 2 channel sound....but it weill never go that far

What I don't understand is the same guy who will put his speaker cables on stilts, have some high school drop out put tubes in his DVD player etc and it never occurs to them to maybe play with the levels/ distances the treble and bass to make the processor sound the way they want.
eandy my Meridian has 8 different trifeild setting to match the scale of the music I'm listening too, this way there's no way 2 channel can sound more natural. The parameters are adjustable for a reason, you can make trifield sound just like two channel if you wanted to, I actually can mimick other systems by fine tuning the adjustments. Keeep digging my friend, its a new type of system, you must learn new ways to adjust it.