Can back surrounds smear the front image?

Whether the number of recordings with true rear ambiance is signifcant or not depends on one's perspective.

I just checked and Amazon shows over 230,000 recordings in the classical genre while they show 305 DVD-A recordings, 3,901 SACDs and 64 Blue Rays.

Certainly those numbers can change a bit with different vendors or the manner in which one searches a catalog, but the point is still less than 2% of classical music material is available in the formats you mention.

In my book, when more than 98% of the available classical cataglog does not offer true rear ambiance, I'd stick with my original assessment. Other's mileage may vary.

Your assessment of the repertoire is correct as stated and, in fact, I agree with the general analysis in your previous post.

However, I was discussing the high prevalence of classical recordings with true rear ambiance compared among the total number of mch recordings.

Of course, all 2-channel stereo recordings lack true rear ambiance.

Kal

Why not just set the processor to stereo when listening to music?

Just to clarify things a bit...when I wrote 'rear' surrounds, I was not referring to side surrounds, which I also have, and are not a problem. Rather I was referring to two additional speakers located on the rear wall of the listening room (= 7.1). I have no problems with the side surrounds, and, as I've noted there seems to be almost nothing out there that is truly discrete 7.1. For most other sources, these rears have the problem I have mentioned if I allow the processor to feed them with signal.

Of course. You are letting your processor "mess with" the signals to synthesize rear speaker output. As Rwwear has suggested, just play stereo as stereo (and 5.1 as 5.1).

Kal