While I haven't spent much time listening to the very few surround music DVDs I own I wouldn't be without surround for films now.
Let's not forget that subwoofers are the product of HT enthusiasm. Stereo fans only flirted with the idea and many still wont let one near their two channel systems.
I was turned to the dark side of film watching by subwoofers. They added so much to ordinary TV and film watching in stereo through my system. Subwoofer addiction was the result of listening to a single, half-hour organ music programme using my stereo tuner through shoebox monitors. (Linn Kan MK1)
I had enjoyed organ recitals at the local cathedrals decades before. Hearing the emasculated effect of tiny monitors reminded me of my system's catastrophic weakness in the bass. Yet bass is an everyday reality for us all. The rumble of a pallet truck in the supermarket, the passing bus and the train all expose us to very low frequencies at levels that most subwoofers can only dream about.
Don't you find music DVDs go flat when you revert to plain old stereo? You've watched a whole DVD of Metallica strutting at a steady 100+dB. You're drooping in your chair. Completely wasted by the experience and soaked with summer sweat. Then you decide to hear how it sounds in stereo with the picture switched off.
Dead boring, isn't it?
Our ears are not humble stereo nor are ours eyes blind. We are surrounded by reality in all its bewildering complexity and its extremes of sound and light and sensation. We must forgive its weaknesses when reproduced by our humble collection of expensive boxes.
Isn't it ironic that no affordable system can accurately reproduce the sound of our hitting one of the empty boxes that once housed a system component on its way home from the dealers?
