Are audiophile products designed to initially impress then fatigue to make you upgrade?

@ghasley

I love the COB and was lucky enough to see him at Carnegie Hall with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra in the nineties. I’ll bet that MC22 costs more now if you can find one than it did brand new back in the day. Today you have many upmixers that do a good job to use whatever speaker set up you like. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that other article and saw the Toole used the same setup I do and is also a fan of the Auro 3D upmixer. The atmos setup you often see is with the MLP closer to the back. Me and Floyd are both equidistant from both walls in the center of the room..

@invalid 

Audio engineer Bob Clearmountain:

One of the other aspects of Atmos mixing on which consensus has yet to be reached concerns the use of the centre speaker. If you want a source such as a lead vocal to appear right in front of the listener, routing it only to the centre speaker will achieve that, but the ‘phantom centre’ effect works in Atmos too, and many people advocate using only the left and right speakers. This is a point on which Clearmountain has strong opinions.

Bob Clearmountain: "One of my favourite things is the centre speaker, because the nice thing is when you anchor stuff to speakers, especially the centre, you can walk around the room and it doesn’t move."

“That’s just silly. I think. One of my favourite things is the centre speaker, because the nice thing is when you anchor stuff to speakers, especially the centre, you can walk around the room and it doesn’t move. If it’s just phantom, you walk over to the right and the phantom centre follows you to the right, just like it does in stereo — which is one of the drawbacks of stereo. I like actually walking around the room, I’ll stand over here on the side between the right side and right rear and the picture still stays the same. I mean, the balances are different, so I’ll be hearing more of whatever’s coming out of those speakers, but everything’s still in the same place, right? The vocal’s still coming from the centre, and I love that.

@kota1  yeah right, I've never heard that with Atmos, maybe with Bacch

Well let’s see.  My ARC SP9 mkll still works perfectly and it’s from 1987. My Acoustat speakers from the eighties still sound great. My Pioneer tuner from the eighties still works and sounds great.  My B&O Beogram 1900 from the seventies needs to be cleaned and lubed.  By your logic,I guess I should toss it and buy a new one. Oh I did toss my Sony professional CD player from the early nineties, but that was because it was from a small run of only a few thousand units and I couldn’t get parts!

Mihorn,

Didn’t they warn you not to take the brown acid??