Ok, so I just HAVE to chime in here with MY two cents, and hopefully, a bit of rational, common sense.

Allow me to carry on a bit.

Let's use a litlle logic here. Form follows function... round peg into a round hole... application should mirror environment.

Multichannel MOVIE sound makes sense, because the action on the screen in a fictional environment can change perspective, and objects can shift their audible perspective from front to back, or from side to side, such as a space ship flying overhead, or a bullet zinging left to right. Fine. So it makes SENSE to have an application of multichannel sound in a system capable of recreating that fictional soundstage, in the context of recreating the fictional story that the director is telling.

Musical performances, however, are VERY different.

In a LIVE, NATURAL, MUSICAL ENVIRONMENT where you are an observer... NOT a performer... the soundstage and performers do not move. Well, OK they do a LITTLE, but you know what I mean... they are static, anchored on a stage.

Anyone who's been to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center will tell you that the Cello player isn't 20 feet behind you near the Men's room. He's on stage in front of your listening environment. And that extends beyond "high theater" to Rock, Jazz, whatever genre you chose. When did you ever have a musician playing an instrument while he walked around or behind you?

IMHO, multichannel sound for musical reproduction (beyond left and right channels) is a farce, and a contrivance, and silliness galore. The whole concept of STEREO is that it is an artifact of our BINAURAL HUMAN CONFIGURATION.

Let's think about this for a moment... humans have two eyes, two ears, and we use the parallax to localize sounds and vision to recreate depth and perspective. Using the arguement for multichannel sound would be like trying to build a case for a 6-eyed binocular. Or how about six-fingered gloves?!?!?

Musical performance is static, and that is why the whole concept of 4, 6, whatever many channels some marketer wants to dupe us into, is nothing more than an ARTIFICIAL CONCOCTION to get more money out of your pocket.

It's great to TALK about the fact that you can "be in the middle of the performance", but so what? What purpose does that serve? When was the last time you were on stage with the performers? When was the last time you sat on the bench with Andre Watts or stood next to Jose Carreras? Never, no doubt.

To recreate such a fictional environment is a disservice to yourself, because it has no basis in reality... and the next time you spend $50 for theater tickets, you're going to be sadly disappointed that there isn't a violin player up your butt. That would be a truly artificial audio soundstage. Pah. Fooey.

It's all sillyness galore, and IMHO, much ado about nothing. The benefit DVD-A brings (if I understand it correctly) is storage capacity. Plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. Where I'm concerned, I'd much rather use the storage capacity to ADD QUANTITY or VALUE, and give us an operatic performance on a single DVD instead of multiple CD-ROMS. That makes sense. It also makes sense to add some "added content" like text, or biographies, or interviews, and whatnot. It might even make sense to sample the audio at a higher bitrate (I'm not sure I'm convinced on that point, either, but hey, I'll listen...)

But to take a nonmoving audio performance and turn it into somehting that has no bearing in reality is ridiculous. Form follows function... even if you can't SEE it, but have to HEAR it.

Ok, I'm done now... (g)