Regarding the use of PLIIx: music and Neo6: music, I've enjoyed them on very few works. Others on this forum say that they use the formats to listen to all 2-channel pieces but I just don't find the same value and I wish I did. Maybe this has to do with my room. If some of you out there could have a look at my room on the wall of fame and give me your opinion, I'd appreciate it. I sit about 12 feet away from all of my surrounds and 8 feet from the fronts.

Now having said that, I was experimenting with the Oscar Pererson: We get Requests album the other day and was simply blown away by Neo6 with some tweaks. As I've mentioned before, this is excellently recorded with a wide soundstage, great imaging and dynamics. With Neo6, the stage gets even further expanded. But I went a step further and tweaked my fronts and center. I adjusted my fronts to minimum volume (-12 on my Denon) and then turned the center up to -9.5. Wow! The soundstage remained wide and tall but now it got very, very deep with no loss in imaging. And it still sounded like it was all happening in front of me rather than beside or behind me. It was stunning and this is now going to be one of my favourite ways to demo my system.

So then I tried Clapton: Unplugged and no matter what I did, it sounded best on 2-channel. PLIIx and Neo muddied it up. Ditto with a few others that I tried. Then I tried Dead can Dance: Into the Labyrinth and as I reported on another post, track 3 sounds like you are in a huge cathedral on Neo which is exactly what it's supposed to sound like. I can't get that same effect in 2-channel. It was simply incredible.

I haven't quite figured out why yet but perhaps these multi-channel modes work better when close-miking techniques aren't used. Close-miking apparently contains minimum ambience. I don't know much about the recording process but it sounds to me like the Oscar Peterson CD I mentioned is not close-miked and maybe that's why Neo works so well. And ditto with track 3 of Into the Labyrinth.

I've read on many posts that people can't tell the difference between PLIIx and Neo6 but there's no mistaking it on my system. In my set-up, PLIIx wraps the soundstage around me while Neo6 expands it in front of me. I don't know if that has to do with my receiver, the room or both. PLIIx does not sound natural to me with music because music doesn't "wrap around" like that in a natural setting.

And then there's Logic7 on the Harman Kardons. Everyone raves about this and I wish I had it so that I could try it out. Maybe one day HK will license this to others.

I want to figure out how to make more use of these surround modes so any comments on any of this would be greatly appreciated.