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

@kota1 thats a cool photo of Sinatra’s system at his Palm Springs home (not the really unique Twin Palms, but instead his later home built at Tamarisk CC). The preamp is a Mcintosh C22, which is stereo. The center is summed in such a setup.

Glad you like your immersive/surround sound setup. Many of us have consciously shied away from such a setup. To do it right it can get pretty pricey if using good gear and then it is still digitized/remixed from typically (there are a few exceptions) 2 channel masters.

@invalid 

The center channel makes you less dependent on one sweetspot. If you go through the virtual system area you will find most members setup their speakers in a equilateral triangle. Why? To create the "phantom" center channel ith two speakers. When you have an actual center channel you are less dependent on the triangle/sweetspot and you can get good imaging just walking around the room.

@kota1  I doubt that, even with all that processing if you could walk around the room and the center channel was still just as coherent, then it would be too much if you did sit in the sweet spot .

@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.