Quote Originally Posted by plextor guy
I've come to the conclusion that unless you're building a dedicated home theater or if you have an ideal layout for multichannel music (again probably a home theater), surround is a huge waste of time and resources. The novelty quicky wears off quickly. Besides, when you're watching a movie most of you concentration is on dialog and visuals. Enhancement of audio by going multichannel is minimal at best. Invest in a good 2.1 system and don't look back - imho.
It doesn't take a dedicated home theater to use a proper configuration for multichannel. Any room large enough to arrange the speakers in the ITU reference layout (diagram posted above) will work fine for multichannel. If you haven't tried a multichannel speaker laid out in this arrangement with the appropriate level matching and delay timing, then you really haven't heard multichannel the way it was supposed to be heard.

I hardly regard 5.1 as novelty. If anything, it's not enhancement of anything, it's merely playing back a soundtrack the way it was originally mixed and meant to be heard. With modern full bandwidth discrete multichannel soundtracks, 5.1 is not a novelty, it's a necessity if you want to play something back the way it's supposed to be heard. The whole point of surround sound is to create a complete envelopment of the viewer to take them into the scene. It adds significantly to the experience with a movie. If anything, playing a 5.1 soundtrack in 2.1 is a distortion of the original source because the multichannel elements have to get mixed down to two-channels in preset proportions. The mixdown is done automatically by the processor without regard for the center imaging or the appropriate levels for surround effects getting steered to the front speakers. If you wind up with something that has any kind of appropriate channel separation and balance between sound elements, it's more by accident than by design.