Do NOT Blow Your Entire Budget on Two Channel Audio

@deep_333 Could you post a pic of your room with your 2 channel set up using Bacch? Id love to see that . Thanks in advance.

@moonwatcher

I’d rather studios simply create great sounding masters in two channels. That would be a START in the right direction.

I think you will really like this 10 minute video by producer Steven Wilson. He discusses how the process he uses is exactly what you describe, getting the BEST two channel master before doing anything else, especially with old recordings.

It Suddenly Became All About Atmos

@kota1 thanks for the link. I'll check it out. Steven Wilson is sadly one of the few out there who seems to care. I'm not against all this "spatial audio" stuff, but just don't see it becoming a mass market thing when so many are happy with a soundbar in front of their TVs. They either aren't going to spend enough to get multi-channel audio right or their significant other is NOT going to let them place speakers and cable all over their multi-functional living space. 

Would you rather have a "so-so" multi-channel set up or a "great" two-channel one for the amount of money you have at your disposal? To me that is the key question. To those with deep pockets and the desire, more power to you. Enjoy. 

On the other hand, say in 50 years or so, could we envision a room shaped like a ball and you sit in the middle in an easy chair and the whole room is planar speakers with "power steering" of a matrix sort controlled by DSP software?

Maybe the whole thing could be miniaturized into a "sound helmet" you could wear that wouldn't be as expensive and still give you the sense of space you are looking for.  

@moonwatcher

just don’t see it becoming a mass market thing when so many are happy with a soundbar in front of their TVs.

The percent of people that will convert their living room to a 7.1.4 setup is probably about the same % as the number of people willing to pay over $2000 for a pair of speakers (few).

However, that doesn’t really matter to AAPL. They have backward compatibility with ALL of their products with spatial audio, see:

Apple sees Spatial Audio as a differentiator between Apple Music and its rivals, and more so than it does Lossless music. Every song in the Apple Music library is now available in Lossless, but Apple’s Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and Beats, says it’s necessarily a niche.

"[The] challenge is it doesn’t play on any headphone in the world over Bluetooth or any wireless connection," he said, "and that is by a country mile the number one way how people consume music these days."

"And so," continues Schusser, "we went out and said we would like to have a feature for the mass market that works on pretty much every device and where people notice a difference."

"We now have more than half of our worldwide Apple Music subscriber base listening in spatial audio and that number is actually growing really, really fast," he adds. "We would like the numbers to be higher, but they are definitely exceeding our expectations."

Apple Says Spatial Audio is a Hit

@moonwatcher

Would you rather have a "so-so" multi-channel set up or a "great" two-channel one for the amount of money you have at your disposal?

I split my budget for a preamp almost down the middle, I have a nice Sony Signature preamp/dac/headphone amp that does 2 channel and a Marantz home theater processor that has a "pure direct" feature for two channel plus everything else. So basically two units at around $2000 a piece instead of one $5K+ home theater processor. That’s just me, you could certainly tilt it toward either format. I found getting my acoustics right made made a bigger difference than the hardware I chose.