Spatial quality of the recording is very important, particularly for multichannel stuff, where it central to the purpose of the disc. I will compare two Multichannel discs, one a Sony Classical SACD of violinist Hillary Hahn playing a concerto, and the other is any of the series of DVD-A put out by the German audiophile label Tacet, mostly chamber music. Both these discs have very clear and musical sound, as they ought to do, being high resolution.
First the good news. The Tacet discs are superb in presenting the performance from the perspective of one of the performers. You can imagine that you yourself are playing the violin, and your buddies on viola, cello, and piano are sitting around your chair. Not everyone can appreciate this "performers perspective" but I think that all would agree that from a purely technical point of view it is astonishing.
The Sony disc, although acclaimed by the trade, is terrible. The performance is excellent (Hillary is good) and the sound quality is up to standard for SACD. However, the person who mastered this disc put the violin almost equally in all channels. Now, a violin is a small sound source, and belongs isolated in the center front. This is almost universal practice for soloists in stereo recordings. There is something else wrong with the mix, in that even with the rears shut off, the violin will not image at the center speaker, but is all over the place. I know this is not an imaging problem with my system because when I play Pentone multichannel discs, which are four channels (not five) it is almost impossible to tell that the center speaker is not playing.
I wonder how much of the skepticism about multichannel sound derives from badly mastered discs?
