I agree that good stereo is under appreciated. People don't sit down and listen these days, music is either in the other room or on earbuds. I have a pair of studio monitors for mixing (Mackie MR8's - cheap, but worlds above similarly-priced competitors) and it's a real pleasure to sit and listen to well-produced stereo recordings. I don't have have a problem with digital as long as it's lossless and the converters aren't crap, but it is nice to get some tubes in the line to warm things up.
The two problems I see with surround sound are:
1) People don't know how to set up their equipment. The subwoofer is always maxed-out to the point of absurd and the other speakers are either placed asymmetrically or strangely EQ'ed.
2) The mix itself sucks. Like Zeta said, the rear speakers go unused most of the time. Obviously, standards for 6.1, 7.1, etc, are still being developed and the the primary role of the rear speakers is generally sound effects, but that doesn't mean they need only be used for explosions. It's a rare treat to find movies like LotR where the engineers have both the creativity and budget to fill in the sound field throughout the movie.
Personally, I have a 5.1 system in my living room with a 27" CTR from the early Nineties. I have cheap, 3-way, Fischer boxes from 1980 as my mains. The center and rear speakers are ten-year-old, Radio Shack RCA's. I don't have a subwoofer and don't care; the LFE is added to the mains and there's no reason I need to hear 30Hz in my living room or torture my neighbors in the downstairs duplex. Even with this pile of crap, there's a lot of things I like. I appreciate the dedicated center speaker for voices, it's cool to hear off-screen actors come from the L-R channels, and the two rear speakers startle me once in a while and are enough to create a spacial, 3D environment without filling my living room with speakers.
Topic: Good movies for surround sound (Read 335 times)
