I can say that I'll generally default to whatever mode the recording was made in.

Up to recently, I had a universal player in my HT system feeding the MC analog inputs of my Denon 2802. As such, I was able to get a taste of true MC music and, on the whole, it was "OK. I had the ubiquitous DSOTM, a few SACD Living Stereo releases and borrowed a few others for a while.

Meh... DSOTM was fun but once the basic effect wore off, it was nothing special. I'd use it if it was there but wouldn't miss it if it were gone. I will say that the center channel of the 50 year-old Living Stereo CD' was nice and shows that the recording technology definitely led the playback process. They still sound good.

As for two channel, that's what I grew up with.

Now, with the advent of a new (non-universal) Blu-ray player, I've moved the Denon universal player to a two channel secondary system and reinstalled my Marantz DVD player in the HT system and still play those dual discs in plain two channel there. I miss the center fill on the LS discs but I don't lose sleep over it. Were it there, I'd still be using and loving it.,

As for artificially inducing multi-channel effects from a two channel source, I've never really liked that and feel it adds an artificial feeling to the music.

I'll take plain two channel for $400, Alex.

But, given a true MC source and a way to play it back, I'll go for that also. When in Rome....