How Do You Play Your Mono Tracks?

[ShnuggMac]

I thought this would make for an interesting thread as mono material really gets no love anymore....

The question is primarily for Onkyo receiver owners, as I am intrested to hear what modes are utilized, but for those of you with some older DVDs/Blu rays in your collection, which modes on your gear do you select to watch the "2.0" or "mono" soundtracks that come on these discs? I have so many of these kinds of discs in my collection; many of them say "2.0 MONO" which has always confused me (both mono channels spread to the two main channels), while others simply say "MONO"....some things I have noticed with all these issues....

With my old Onkyo TX-SR600, there were no specific "MONO" modes on the DSP algorithm, so I simply let PRO LOGIC II MOVIE mode take over for these soundtracks and the whole mix would be dropped into the center channel...now, with this new TX-SR605 I have, there are a few "Original Onkyo DSP Modes" and such which offer MONO MOVIE, MONO and FULL MONO modes; however, at the end of the day, most of the mono material I play with these modes sound like ****....the MONO MOVIE mode is supposed to put the track in the center channel and add reverb in the other channels, but I dont hear it....the MONO mode puts the track equally in the two front channels, like STEREO, but this creates what I call that "comb filtering" effect, where the whole track sounds unbalanced and weird....I didnt like it. Then, there's the FULL MONO mode, which puts the track in every single speaker, like ALL CHANNEL STEREO, but this sounds horrible....again, the best sounding mode for these mono tracks seems to be PRO LOGIC II MOVIE, which drops the whole track in the center speaker. Why did Onkyo bother putting these mono modes in their products when they really don't work?

I would love to hear from other members on how they watch their mono DVDs....