Onkyo SR606 5.1 playback on 7.1 system

[statikcat]

Originally Posted by Trix

Maybe this is a bad place to ask it, and I in no way am trying to berate the OP, but, I've been wondering something for a while.

It takes a whopping 2.4 seconds to chastize someone on this site about stretching or cropping movies out of their OAR, but never, ever, have I come across any complaints about listening to material in its original sound mix. The only exception I'd like to point out is the valid complaints concerning older movies not retaining their mono tracks, and I agree that older mono tracks should not necessarily be re-encoded into 5.1.

Arguably, the concept is the same; instead of "I bought a 50" TV and I want to watch all 50" of it!", we hear "I have 7 speakers and I want to hear sound out of all of them!". But, what if you weren't meant to be hearing out of all 5 speakers? Sure, you're only matrixing the surrounds to the surround rears as well, essentially hearing the same thing out of both speakers, but, this isn't how it was encoded or envisioned, so, why?

I understand but let me explain a few things.

5.1 or 7.1 has nothing to do with a number of speakers.. but a number of channels. How many speakers does a movie theater have?

I touched on this briefly above but I will explain further as this is the main reason for my post. In a 5.1 setup the surrounds are placed behind you. In a 7.1 the surrounds are placed directly to your left and right while the surround rears are placed behind you. Now, without matrixing 5.1 the sound that is intended to come from behind you is now suddenly beside you. If you spread that signal to your surround rears the result makes the rear signal sound like it is behind you again. This gives you a more realistic 5.1 sound with a 7.1 setup.

I can see where you are coming from but completely disagree based on the above.