Why 7.1 Surround Sound is Overkill For Most Homes

RX8 writes "Home Theater expert Mark Fleischmann explains why you should not fall for the 7.1 hype and why 5.1 surround sound is adequate for most homes. From the article: 'With the marketing of 6.1 and 7.1 surround, the industry has decisively outwitted itself. It has convinced many consumers to buy new receivers and more speakers. But it has also undermined the 5.1-channel standard, which is more appropriate for the home, slowing the acceptance of surround sound in general.'"

Comments

Equipment vs. Media

[mauthbaux]

I personally have a decent 5.1 surround system. It's far from the top end of things, but noticeably better than most of the cheap systems you see for sale at Wal-Mart.

From the variety of movies that I've watched on it, my big complaint lies with the audio encoding of the movies themselves rather than with the equipment it's playing on. I have a few hundred DVDs, and there's only a handful of them where it seems that any real effort was put into the channeling of the audio. The Superbit version of the Fifth Element comes to mind as a movie that simply sounds incredible with the surround. Most of the rest of them fall short, even ones with dts.

I have a suspicion that the dts tracks on some of them were just copies of the Dolby (or even Stereo) tracks that had just been resampled at a higher bitrate. It would be like using a casette to record a song from a radio broadcast and then encoding it into a 128kHz mp3. It's still not going to sound as good as the original (The original CD... not the radio recording).

Anyway, perhaps I'm wrong but, it seems like the shortcomings in my sound system (and many others as well) is not so much the equipment, but the quality of the media being played. Anyone else seen a difference between DVD distributions of movies? Or perhaps have a preferrence in the companies you buy your DVDs from?