I have been exposed to some of these solutions, including BACCH DSP. I don’t feel that they are solutions for this particular issue. They do remove the head-in-a-vise problem but they are far from allowing two people sitting comfortably on a love sofa to experience the stereo effect equally. Nothing is perfect, but like you said, maybe someday…
Failure of Multichannel
This is a supplement to the currently revived thread on SACD.
The most important reason for SACD, DVD-A, and Blu Ray to fail was that all physical media couldn’t survive the rise of streaming.
There is a current attempt to revive it with non physical media, with Apple leading the way. I don’t have any data handy but I don’t think that it’s been particularly successful.
It was released at a time when baby boomers, the biggest consumers at the time, were raising families, perhaps having their first divorces. It having multiple speakers, with the entailed wiring, and new sources and amplification is a more daunting start up challenge than say buying our first two channel systems as young adults.
In the non classical/non jazz sphere a lot of multichannel releases were gimmicky, reminiscent of quad. Separate speakers for different instruments. This party trick could wear thin with time.Many serious listeners didn’t detect any sonic advantage, even when the mixes were more musical. I personally enjoyed the ambiance that a label such as Pentatone would place in rears, but many Classical lovers didn’t perceive this or thought it was gimmicky.
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There is a recording of the Brahms Symphonies by Marek Janowski and the Pittsburgh SO on Pentatone that really gets the hall resonance right. You can hear how the conductor times entrances to allow for hall decay so as to not muddy textures. I’ve burned these discs to my server and in two channel they sound fine but I miss that information from the rears |
I dabbled in surround music during a five year rest from vinyl. Ultimately, I decided there was more mileage in focussing my resources on stereo. Roon and Linn Exakt combined to expand my stereo system to surround sound. It worked quite well with some albums. Yet, I gave it up because the sound quality fell short of what I was obtaining from stereo. The first problem was that my Linn DSM doesn’t play surround files. So I used a Roon ROCK NUC outputting via HDMI. That just couldn’t match the quality of stereo on the DSM. Secondly, my active integrated surround speakers, while a tidy solution, didn’t match the sound quality of front channels amps and speakers. When returning to stereo, I realised there was already a great deal of depth and immersion in the stereo set up. Surround was unnecessary for musical enjoyment and quality is more important. I also found I was listening to music that wasn’t to my taste just because it was available in multichannel. Reluctantly, I traded in the surround speakers against an upgrade of the stereo DACs. If Linn ever enable the DSM to play multichannel files, I may reconsider. One unexpected bonus was that removal of the surround speakers from the room did benefit sound quality of stereo. |
Wrong on many counts...A guy only needs 2 stereo pairs (total of 4) and it can all be done analog without any dsp. The following describes a setup with 3 pairs, but, one can get some great results with just 2 pairs... that can make him regret going back to stereo. Angela Yeung has many videos on this topic. https://youtu.be/_MO3kmCzKsI?si=ULbU--75f5V6sF-n
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