"You know nothing about what you talk about, either technically or
aesthetically. I've been involved with surround sound for 43 years, probably
longer than you've been alive. ..."

Where ? I'm 52 and the only thing we had here 40 years ago that resembled surround was quadrophonic. Movies weren't even in stereo.

I still have a Marantz CD4 decoder that I've used to transcribe vinyl to digital. There is no carrier but it is a damn good phono preamp.

When I was a kid I discovered something, that when you connect a speaker between the two hots (+ or red) of an amp you get the difference signal. That is how the elcheapo method worked actually to get the rear channels but they used a resistor to common to allow some of the L+R, but only a portion of it. This does not work with amps that run the two channels out of phase, but those are kinda rare.

Now they use OP AMPs pretty much for the basic surround. Digital delay is added for the effects like "hall", "auditorium" and so forth. It is all in a chip but if you look back in the prints of older equipment that used discrete components you can figure it out. Also, along came a guy named Bob Carver who tried to do some tricks with digital delay and called it sonic holography. that baby was supposed to enhance the stereo image by sending a "null echo" for lack of a better term, to the opposite speaker. IIRC you were supposed to have them a certain distance apart for this "magic" to work properly.

All junk as far as I am concerned. That is an opinion. In movies, the effects and ambience are excessive to the point wherte you can hardly understand the dialogue and you have to crank it to hear it, and then a car blows up or something and it happens to be three AM. This annoys enough people that the TV manufacturers started equipping TVs with audio compressors, calling it "Smart Sound" or "Level Sound" or a few other names.

If you lived in Europe or something 40 years ago maybe you had surround sound there, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that here in the US, the TV news has more dynamic range than the supposedly high fidelity FM radio. That's not so good either. We modulate at four times the level of European stations, why ? Also look at the difference in the European version and the US one of Golden Earring - Moontan. The US version has the grooves much more modulated. Why ? Cheap turntables. Signal to noise ration is easier to deal with when things are LOUD, in fact something like that is stated in the original explanation of how Dolby noise reduction works. (or worked, I think they just make surround chips now)

The sheeple will actually buy an amp with 5 % more power for alot more money with all other things being equal. Seriously, you will not notice the difference between 110 watts and 120 watts if all other specs are equal. We know that. Marketing knows that. Alot of the market does not know that so guess what they sell.

Except for the PC that feeds everything now, I am not really interested in audio equipment less than 20 years old. Older even. There are some exceptions, I might like a pair of Martin Logans or something like that, but those are not at Walmart. They may be well worth the money but I will not spend that much unless I hit the lottery, and I don't play because it's a sucker bet.

Maybe I'm an old fuddy duddy. I see an RJ45 on an amplifier and I say to myself "Why ?". do we really need this **** ? And to me, really it doesn't sound better. You still don't see the THD rating on mosat speakers, you know why ? Because then peole might figure out paying twice as much for an equal power amp with 0.003 % THD instead of 0.005 % is a waste of money because most speakers hit 1 % even at one watt. Shhh, don't tell.

You made a mistake. I said I think stereo is it, and all this surround **** is junk and you failed to realize that is an opinion. That is my opinion, absolutely.

These days the only TV or movies I watch is on the PC. I have the TV output and it's hooked up to an amp. I WISH that amp has a mono selector. It actually does, but becasue I use the tape monitor in case I want to rip analog to the PC, the mono button does not work. Luckily most of the stuff I watch is ono anyway, just PLEEEEEZE do not try to ****ing enhance is or give it fake stereo.

Although they did remix some of the Star Trez TOS, but it seems they only did the effects and left the dialogue alone. Thank Peter Pan for that much.