I am in agreement with most everyone and especially appreciate Woochifer's points because it emphasizes the comparison to live music and brings up an appropriate composer in Mahler, who has french horns playing from other areas of the hall. Corlilgano symphony has individual horm players stationed at points all around the concert hall behind the majority of listeners in the orchestra section with staccato bursts of sound. It's great live and I am looking for a DVD-A or SACD of this work. But these two works certainly bring home the idea that "multichannel" is part and parcel of the live listening experience in more than just ambience, fill, harmonics and sound reflections.

I think of this issue as being indicative of the marching forward of technology and its gradual assimilation into everyday life and the home. Of course, these things happen much faster now. Take when CD came out - it took the recording engineers a long time to truly understand the different techniques necessary to use digital to best effect - this is why some early cd's sounded harsh - it wasn't "digital" as we now fully understand, it was how it was utilized.

In fact, much content now is better in its production than what is being recorded - but that is a different gripe that reveals my stodginess - Where I was going is that the processing power to compute millisecond delays to 5 or 7 speakers took a while to reach the level necessary for recordings to sound musical in the home and not gimmicky. Likewise, the other half of the equation, the engineers, again had to accumulate new skills for the multichannel environment - a process we are only at the beginning of.

I would respectfully suggest that multichannel will insinuate itself into most of our lives at an incremental but ever increasing rate. After all, most of us can only afford one "High Fidelity" set-up, if that. But have you noticed how the price of PrePros keeps dropping? It's all in the chips. Meanwhile, solid state amps are also less expensive than they used to be per watt, leaving speakers as the main obstacle to higher end multichannel for everyone.

It is probably unfortunate that development of multichannel is driven by movies rather than music but music soundracks will ultimately lead back to pure music recordings, I hope.

Anyway, I have large LP collection, some of which are mono and these are not going to be replaced just because I go 7.2. In fact, I will probably change to into "bypass" mode and listen in stereo to many musical pieces, but having the ability to listen in true multichannel for the immersive and accurate effect it will have in recreating the concert hall or the jazz club (save me from the stadium, please) is what I am looking forward to.

Last note - looking forward because altho I now have my 7.2 speakers, and amplification for the 9 channels, I am waiting for the release of the PrePro I intend to use, the Emotiva XMC-1.

Don't flame this noob too hard, I beg you.