@deep_333 --
Interesting topic. Never heard a well set-up multi channel system to convince me of its sonic/musical merits (which is also saying, implicitly, that I’ve heard a range of bland ones), not to say there aren’t good ones out there.
@phusis Many of these HT guys set up their gear optimizing for multiple sweet spots (including the mother-in-law seat), a.k.a. every sweet spot got compromised...not to mention some chair with a huge backrest covering the guy’s entire head! These are very straightforward observations one can make. There’s also a trend there which goes, "I paid for all these extra speakers, so i better hear them discreetly". The seamless soundfield went downhill that day and every speaker screeched on its own. It’s a bit too much of the quantity over quality with those guys, etc, etc. Hence, running into a setup that sounds good for music can be rare with that crew (Many of these guys are not audiophiles to begin with).
A typical scenario implies that I would listen to a multi-channel system quite different from my own with regard to the specific components used (not least the speakers), with the more interesting and relevant experiment being the one that was made around a component-similar expansion of my existing setup and seeing how that would turn out.
You would indeed fine tune the existing stereo setup for music before you added anything to it for multichannel.
What’s the worst thing that could happen? Maybe, you ended up with a killer rig for all the movies, tv, games, etc (but got a bit lackluster for music) and dropped it back to 2 channel for music, i.e. a 2 channel/multi-channel hybrid system.
What’s the best thing that could happen? Maybe, the multichannel add on did indeed blow the socks off your 2 channel and you stuck with it for all your content (music, movies, etc),
Even the best passive crossover components can’t escape the fact that they’re impeding with the amp to driver interface, potentially much more so the more complex they are, and it also means only taking partial advantage of your amp’s performance envelope instead of having it looking into a purer load actively.
What some may feel is gained from a "purist," analogue approach with quality component passive crossovers to others is missing the bigger picture in not taking into account its negative effect with regard to amp to driver interfacing. The quality of a DSP acting as a digital crossover actively is not irrelevant, but from my chair its overall sonic impact is of a significantly more "benign" nature as a line level, prior-to-amplification measure compared to a passive configuration on the output side of the amp, which affects both amp and driver performance more severely.
I tried the active route with a GR speaker kit and minidsp’s stuff. It is easier with a diy kit, you simply set the passive crosssover aside and interface with the minidsp kit. I didn’t get the best sound there and i almost felt like the minidsp unit was borderline faulty.
Storm Audio (not cheap) lets one go active with any number of speakers on their multichannel processors. When i did have that processor, i wasn’t thinking about the active route too much, i.e., was already invested in passive configurations and ended up selling it.
