Quote Originally Posted by Ajani
Even at $2K per speaker, 6 speakers would still require a significant investment ($12K)... MC Audio will always be plagued by the problem of convincing 2 channel lovers to invest that heavily in a MC system... If the format is to be a success it really needs to capture the interest of the hardcore HT fans, since they have already invested in MC setups...
It doesn't even have to be $2k per speaker. That's only my very approximate point at which audio improvements start diminishing rapidly. You can set any number of reasonable budget points, and the things that IMO multichannel can do better than two-channel would still apply. Accordingly, you'd still have to make the choice as to whether the extra steps up in speaker quality are worth it to stay with two speakers. For my own system, I invested just over $2k on my entire 5.1 speaker setup. For my listening preferences, there's no way I would spend the entire $2k on just two speakers -- the incremental improvement in sound quality from two channels would not be worth the tradeoff of no surround speakers and no subwoofer.

Personally, I don't think that HT fans are mutually exclusive from music fans. I would suspect that most HT owners use their systems like I do -- as a dual-purpose setup for both two-channel and 5.1 sources. One of the two major issues with multichannel music is simple -- there has been little to no distribution of multichannel titles in recent years, and DVD-A and SACD never had full support from the music industry to begin with (i.e., only one DVD-A title ever came out on the same date as the CD version, and only a few hybrid CD/SACDs have had day and date releases). The other major issue is consumer demand, which hasn't shown clear signs of mainstream support for high res audio.

Blu-ray has gained traction on the video side because the consumer demand for HD video has been high, and because of strong studio support in which all new major releases now come out concurrently with the DVD version. It remains to be seen how strong the demand and supply sides come out for Blu-ray audio.