Any real benefits in going for a home cinema amp when watching older movies?

[romain]

Hi,

I am currently setting up a room that will double as my projection room and as my main listening room for music. The question is whether I should go for a hi-fi audio amp, a home cinema amp or a cheaper home cinema amp with pre-out outputs for the front speakers that I can then power with a power amp (the idea being that I'll get better results for music listening that way while still being able to add more speakers for movie watching).

What I don't know is whether I will really benefit from a home cinema amp considering the fact that I watch movies from the silent era all the way to the late 1970's but practically nothing beyond that.

I was unable to find the feature in "Stats" that shows the distribution of audio formats in my collection (I used to be able to do it, maybe that feature has disappeared, maybe it's hidden somewhere)

Empirically by checking some physical discs however I see a lot of "Monaural", "2.0 Mono", "DTS Mono", "Mono LPCM", "1.0 Mono PCM", some "DTS Stereo", and very occasionally "2.0 Surround", "5.1 Surround" (I could only find Robert Altman's Nashville in that format, but without being able to access bluray.com's statistics, not sure how common it was in the 1970's, seems like the exception rather than the norm) and one "Dolby TrueHD 7.1" ("Dead and Buried" UHD)

So far I have mainly been checking audiophile forums for advice since I've always watched my movies using a hi-fi amp so I don't know what I might be missing. I'm not really sure whether I would benefit from a central speaker and possibly satellites (but in that case, how does the home theatre amp distribute a mono or stereo source into more than two channels?)

So I'm interested in hearing from the home theatre side of the equation. Any thoughts?