Why is 2 Channel better than multi-channel?

just because it's harder (and more expensive) to get multichannel set-up properly does NOT make 2-channel better!

go listen to peter gabriel's up, roxy music's avalon, bryan ferry's boys and girls, and pink floyd's dark side of the moon on a properly set-up multichannel system and then listen to it again in 2-channel and tell me if you can honestly prefer the two-channel.

it seems that people once heard one thing in m/c that they didn't like or heard it on an improperly set up multichannel system and are using at a basis to forever bash it, regardless of whatever strides it makes.

this is the same as preferring mono over stereo because you heard stereo once with a system that had the speakers on uneven plains, bad cd-player, dirty ac, etc.

Alos too many have these super over-priced 2 channel rigs and cant afford to up-grade so they just shit on anything that isnt 2 channel ignorance is bliss

"Hey Jeffreybehr. With 2 channel, music still arrives at our 2 ears from all directions. And live music *starts* its journey to our ears typically from in front of us, not all around us. So what's your point?"

My point is that an equally good 4- or 5-channel system simply gets it 'righter' than the same-quality 2-channel system. I have NEVER heard a 2-channel system that sounds as natural and spacious when playing big-orchestra music as my own 5-channel system. I can't comment on multichannel pop mixes since I listen to none, but the vast majority of multichannel recordings of big orchestras I've heard sound more natural and real--more like The Absolute Sound of a real orchestra playing in a real space--than the BEST 2-channel recordings I've ever heard, and they sound MUCH better than the multimono, multimiced, knob-twiddled 2-channel recordings that comprise about 95% of the classical recordings we usually get.

No matter how great a 2-channel system sounds, and some of them can and do sound VERY good, adding 3 appropriately matching channels to it will improve its realism and naturalness...IMO, of course.

I'm damn glad the industry has come up with the hi-res, multichannel media of DVD-A and SACD. They may not be selling lots, but QUALITY never has--witness the gross revenues of the brain-dead boom-and-crash movies aimed at adolescent diddeeboppers compared with those of some movies one may have to THINK about, such as 'Off the Map', 'Sideways', or 'The Wild Parrotts of Telegraph Hill'.

I suspect those of you who dis multichannel-music reproduction may never have heard a great-sounding one. If you're ever in Phoenix, look me up.
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to add to jeffrebehr's offer - if you're in austin/san antonio area, look me up.

by the way, nice system there, jeff!

OH! So what you are saying is that you like it better. That's quite different from offering a theoretical reason why it *is* intrinsically better, which is what I took you to be offereing when you said 'Music arrives at our 2 ears from all directions. Five channels gets it lots righter than just 2', as an apparant explanation of why 5 channel is better than two. That explanation would go just as well (or badly) for 10 channel rather than 5, 17 rather than 13, and n+1 rather than n.

Anyway, if you are just saying it sounds better, maybe so. But that doesn't answer or even address the OP's question at all. It just contradicts its implication.

Rnm4