Wanna take it to the next level? Buy MORE speakers!

A mere two speakers has inherent issues and limitations. But so far, to my ears, it’s hard to get multi-channel to sound as good on music. I’ve tried up-mixing 2 channel recordings to a 3 channel with derived center using various methods because I always hear a tonal issue with the phantom center caused by interaural crosstalk. But my best efforts have introduced issues of their own. I can improve the center with more speakers, but only at the expense of the rest of the sound field. Or, the center no longer seems to fit in with the rest of the sound field quite naturally enough. Better to just use two speakers and experiment with the speaker placement and room treatments to optimize the results to your preference. Optimal gear matters too. I’m not sure about digital doing something bad that analog gets right, but I’ll take Mike’s word for that because he has an optimized analog system and I don’t.

For video games, surround sound is awesome! I can definitely hear with greater precision which direction things are coming from in the game with more speakers. For movies it can work too, but I’m not into that. The screen is only in front of me and I don’t have control of the camera like I do in a video game, so I prefer to have the sounds stay in the front too. A center channel can be good for vocals in movies, but that mostly matters for people sitting off center. My guests all couldn’t care less. As long as they can hear the words they’re good.

My nephew is one exception. He seems to notice the imaging and pay attention to the sound field. He tells me the "surround sound" is amazing, even though it's just 2 channel stereo.

@mikelavigne 

i will easily throw 1000 of my vinyl records at the typical surround sound effort and get more back in musical essence. much more. my source has more meat on the bones with an analog source, and it gets everything dead solid perfect. not a mess.

This issue with a more solid "meat on the bones" sound, and a sense that everything is dead solid perfect with golden age analog is fascinating to me because it's hard to know for sure why this is. We can look at the signal that was originally coming off the mic, and then see what happens by the time it's been laid down on vinyl, and it has been changed a lot. I read somebody talking about listening to test tones on vinyl. Simple, single sine wave test tones. They reported that the same tone on vinyl sounded nicer than when played through digital. How can that be when it's just a single tone sinewave? Can the digital really be messing that up, somehow making it sound thin and lacking? Looking on a scope revealed very significant amount of harmonic distortion and noise on the sinewave coming off the vinyl. It had been considerably embellished, and sounded nicer as a result. I think this is perhaps a happy accident. Sound coming from just two sources in a room when it's supposed to present an entire sound field is inherently lacking, and may perceptually benefit from some kinds of enrichment. There's also interesting cases where some noise can actually help us hear, or see better, allowing our minds to fill in what's missing. 

I've been looking for an example of this I found once that showed text that was very hard to read until random noise was added. I've run in to problems with a lack of noise on images that I stacked in an attempt to get rid of all noise in the shadows. The result is obvious banding in the shadows if you look closely. That's a digital issue but it'd probably be an analog issue to if it was possible to get the noise super low on an analog print that didn't have fine enough film grain. Film just doesn't work that way so it's not possible.  Analog has very fine resolution, but it's not all filled with real signal off the microphone because that gets smeared away beyond a certain resolution, which is usually lower than what digital can do. But the noise and distortion is being created in real time during playback, with the noise at a much higher resolution both in terms of timing and level. In the golden age they were only listening to that kind of playback, and so everything was optimized with those effects in play.

I read a long article about high resolution sound, and the guy in charge of re-mastering was saying that no analog is, by the definitions they had come up with,  capable of high resolution. Yet they convert master tapes to something crazy like 192 kHz 32 bit, and it's mostly  just recording a bunch of noise from the tape head at high resolution. But maybe that's the point!

Just thinking here, not making any claims with absolute certainty.

A mere two speakers has inherent issues and limitations. But so far, to my ears, it’s hard to get multi-channel to sound as good on music. I’ve tried up-mixing 2 channel recordings to a 3 channel with derived center using various methods because I always hear a tonal issue with the phantom center caused by interaural crosstalk. But my best efforts have introduced issues of their own.

@asctim  A lot of this can be attributed to a void of information about how the codecs themselves function... effects, ambience, what gets pulled up to the height layer, what's retained in the bed layer, etc, etc. On @mikelavigne  's quote below about the funky sound, his Trinnov with that 9.3.6 might sound great for movies/games, but, i have a feeling that it got a bit too complex for music.  Perhaps, I would have used the word "funky" as well when i had a rig that got too complex. It would be quite hard to get the room/placement etc right to accommodate that high a speaker count and keep the quality of the speakers high.

i have a separate Trinnov 9.3.6 surround sound Home Theater system. music through it does sound good, and fun, and.......funky. but it's not in the realm of my 2 channel for true connection. it's something.......different. YMMV.

At some point, i had some discussions with one of Sony's guys behind their 360 reality technology. For music, you may want to keep the speaker count a li'l lower.

Ideally, for music, you take a compass and draw a circle, your speakers should be equidistant sitting on the perimeter of that circle. Even a center channel may not be necessary (could cause more problems than not for music in a single sweet spot). You may need a couple of heights (equidistant, maintaining the radius upwards) or may not need them, depending on the quality of the bed layer speakers. In most cases, a speaker count higher than a 5.2.2 may not work too well, start to act a li'l "funky". If the heights get a li'l too close, it may start to fall apart again...In other words, you may need to turn some speakers off and have a calibration saved separately for movies and music.

The idea is to blend it together so no speaker stands out or is even remotely localizable in a seamless soundfield. Depending on the codec and processor you're using, they may come with different features to tweak it just right.

Here's an example.

I have had artists over, played their own tracks for them on both stereo and my multichannel rig. I have asked the question over and over..."How would you want your track/album to sound?" Not a single one of them has picked stereo yet after he heard it upmixed into multichannel...Artist intent, it is then!!

This issue with a more solid "meat on the bones" sound, and a sense that everything is dead solid perfect with golden age analog is fascinating to me because it's hard to know for sure why this is. We can look at the signal that was originally coming off the mic, and then see what happens by the time it's been laid down on vinyl, and it has been changed a lot. I read somebody talking about listening to test tones on vinyl. Simple, single sine wave test tones. They reported that the same tone on vinyl sounded nicer than when played through digital. How can that be when it's just a single tone sinewave? Can the digital really be messing that up, somehow making it sound thin and lacking? Looking on a scope revealed very significant amount of harmonic distortion and noise on the sinewave coming off the vinyl. It had been considerably embellished, and sounded nicer as a result. I think this is perhaps a happy accident. Sound coming from just two sources in a room when it's supposed to present an entire sound field is inherently lacking, and may perceptually benefit from some kinds of enrichment. There's also interesting cases where some noise can actually help us hear, or see better, allowing our minds to fill in what's missing. 

I've been looking for an example of this I found once that showed text that was very hard to read until random noise was added. I've run in to problems with a lack of noise on images that I stacked in an attempt to get rid of all noise in the shadows. The result is obvious banding in the shadows if you look closely. That's a digital issue but it'd probably be an analog issue to if it was possible to get the noise super low on an analog print that didn't have fine enough film grain. Film just doesn't work that way so it's not possible.  Analog has very fine resolution, but it's not all filled with real signal off the microphone because that gets smeared away beyond a certain resolution, which is usually lower than what digital can do. But the noise and distortion is being created in real time during playback, with the noise at a much higher resolution both in terms of timing and level. In the golden age they were only listening to that kind of playback, and so everything was optimized with those effects in play.

I read a long article about high resolution sound, and the guy in charge of re-mastering was saying that no analog is, by the definitions they had come up with,  capable of high resolution. Yet they convert master tapes to something crazy like 192 kHz 32 bit, and it's mostly  just recording a bunch of noise from the tape head at high resolution. But maybe that's the point!

Just thinking here, not making any claims with absolute certainty.

Mark "Disruptor" Levinson fixed all of this for ya. The official studio master for anything that got released in the past 20 30 years is a hires digital file. There's no tape anywhere...You convert that file with Daniel Hertz's Master Class software and you will get what you tend to perceive with analog mastertape (if that's what you desire). After that, might you need to think about CD, Vinyl, etc? You don't really...

Ok, if you have a sentimental SACD collection , maybe you'd like to keep a SACD player around...