Good to hear various opinions on DPL II... I took note of the importance of setting it correctly to the Music mode.
I am clearly inexperienced in surround sound systems, but what really impressed me at the store demo the other day was the reproduction of the hall ambience. I knew that the CD I brought for the demo contained a lot of indirect sounds (most classical concert halls are acoustically VERY live with a long decay time; I understand that unless you seat right in front of the stage, over 80% of what you hear in a typical symphonic concert is indirect sound!). I was amazed that all those reverbration sounds actually surrounded me rather than coming from the front. Moreover, the off-stage brass ensemble, which Mahler often uses in his symphonies, indeed sounded "remote" and indirect, clearly separate from the rest of the orchestra and chorus -- something I had never heard from this recording before.
This recording is certainly an extremely good one, but still it is a traditional 2-channel CD. I was stunned by the amount and quality of spacial ques that can be exracted from traditional 2-ch sourses by the latest incarnation of matrix decoding technologies.
Cheers!
