TomCat wrote
It's all to do with Psycoacoustics.... ?....IOW how the brain interprets what your ears are hearing.
Surround home theater system do not always reproduce stereo music well as the surround processor matrixes the two channels into 5 + sub based on the left/right information on the CD. The process is called Pro-Logic. The problem with this is that the stereo balance of the original recording is knocked out of kilter and the music invariably loses it's impact as much of the information is lost in the "Effect" of Surround.
If you can....listen to stereo in stereo to maintain the original impact and balance of the recording.
Once you go surround a lot of the information is then sent to the rear channels, taking away the focus of the music that should be in front of you. When a lot of information is sent to your ears from the wrong direction, your brain tries to put it together and reconstruct what it thinks should be the right setup. This process causes what is referred to as Listening fatigue which could be the reason you "lose interest" quickly....
My home setup is a 2.1 or stereo with a sub as the majority of my listening material (CD and DVD) is music.
Hope that makes sense....... :-\
Tom, many thanks for that very interesting posting. I had a feeling in my water that it was something to do with converting stereo to 5.1, but I couldn't get anywhere close to your explanation.
The manual for my system is full of references to "stereo mode". Disabling of pro-logic, for example, is available in stereo mode. Unfortunatley what the manual doesn't tell you is how to select "stereo mode". I read through the whole thing twice over the weekend, but not a sausage.
DVDs, even live music DVDS (the few that I have) tend to sound pretty good - but that's presumably because everything was recorded and mixed for 5.1 anyway and so there's no conversion and thus no "muddying" taking place.
