Unfortunely 2 channel stereo cannot represent spaital cues from the side or rear, and these cues are as much apart of the "live" experience as the frontal information.
So what? I listen to the music the way the recording engineer intended it to be listened to. Not some egghead at Yamaha using a cheap DSP processor to add sound delays and distortion to mimmick what my living room might sound like if it were Yankee Stadium.

The majority of recording specific material, and that's like, 99.98% of the market, is two channel. The fancy surround modes in your $300 Sony Receiver do not extract magical sound channels that the engineer put there to hide from 2-channel audio enthusiast. It only makes up what it thinks might sound like multi channel recordings. If the engineer doesn't put that information there in the first place, I have no desire to listen to it, got it?

Again, unless I'm watching an Eagles or Sting concert on DVD, and there's native 5/7.1 information I'l be happy to pipe it through my surrounds. I'm otherwise not having some mass produced IC board *invent* what's not there. Best analogy I can think of is taking your favorite family picture to the closest novelty store, and have them apply that plastic diffraction laminate used to make your Scooby Doo lunchbox look 3-dimensional. Cheesy and Fake? I feel the same way about pumping 2-channel music through something that invents sound delays and channels that weren't there in the first place.

To be honest, the only really good high quality multi channel sound I've ever heard is from Delos Labs.