Surround sounds good in the same way you hear anything new that stands out and gets your attention and makes you go wow that's new. Only just like everything else like that its only so long until you get tired of the sparkly new and then you're stuck going hey where's the natural you are there detail I hear from stereo this surround crap sucks.
Which it does. Surround sucks. Its a joke. There's really good reasons why too.
A big one is surround requires surround processors and that means a chip and chips are noisy and contaminate everything around them. Just look how many awesome old tube amps there are. They sound wonderful precisely because they are so simple. The more complex the circuit the harder it is to do it right. Surround is the most complex circuit in audio. No wonder it sucks.
Another big reason surround sucks, there is only so much money to go around. There's overpriced stuff and there's high value stuff but the plain fact of the matter is that in general quality costs, and in audio quality rules over quantity. If the first watt is no good why would you want 200 more of them? Same goes for everything. How good of an amp can you buy with $500? Okay. Now buy 7. What's that? You can't do it? Of course not. Surround forces you to take your $2500 speaker budget, that could have bought you two really nice speakers, and instead spread it over 5 or more. So now instead of a $2500 pair of speakers you've got a pair of $500 speakers. Which do you suppose is going to sound better?
Same goes for the amps, speaker cables, interconnects, power cords. Surround is a dead lock guarantee of money spent to achieve mediocrity. At best. Or crap, as I prefer to call it in my characteristically acerbic yet brutally honest vernacular.
