Oh, and there's one other catch to the plan: only two of the newest Onkyo TX-NR818 and TX-NR717 AV receivers will support the service. I have no idea why other receivers won't be capable of playing the files. I don't see the failures of music surround formats as failures of the various technologies; it's mostly because the market has consistently demonstrated a near total lack of interest in surround sound, unless it's accompanied by a picture. Few people actually listen to music at home anymore, which is probably the only place they could hear music in surround, but back in the 1970s and 1980s, a fair share of listening time was at home, and even then surround sales never added up to more than a trickle. Movies have had surround sound in theaters for more than half a century, and multichannel movies are now -- in theaters and at home -- the norm. We've had the opportunity to buy music surround formats for almost as long, and not one has ever gained widespread acceptance in the market.

Do we need to cater to the lowest common denominator? When different storage and playback formats came out in the 50's and 60's, you saw an effort from the manufacturers to explain to people how much better the next thing was going to be for them.

Remember the rise and fall of Quadraphonic in the 1970s? True believers blamed the demise on Quad's baffling range of discrete- and matrix-encoded variants: 8-track cartridges, open-reel tapes, and at least four types of LPs. Once Quadraphony was dead and buried, surround music didn't try to make a comeback until the late 1990s. What was needed was a unified surround format that didn't require music lovers to invest in new playback gear. Surely such a format would prove the viability of music surround.. DTS Entertainment introduced such a system in the late 1990s: The DTS Digital Surround CD. Those 20-bit discs were playable on any DVD or CD player—as long as it was connected to a digital A/V receiver or surround processor. How to use neat scanner without subscription.

The proof of that is easy to see; if people loved 5.1 music, we'd see a lot more surround releases. If you can cite any noteworthy new, not remixed 5.1-channel rock, jazz, or world music titles, please share your thoughts in the comments. Surround has been around for ages, and there's not much of note to show for it. Add to the fact that fewer and fewer music listeners have surround systems and there's even less of a market for surround music than before.

Free samples in 24bit/96kHz PCM, DSD64 and DXD formats. Registration required. Three high-res stereo downloads (24bit/44.1kHz and 24bit/48kHz). Four tracks provided by Downloads NOW! Registration required.

Buy products related to 5.1 surround music products and see what customers say about 5.1 surround music products on Amazon.com FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases.

They repeated that pledge the following year, but the major labels squeezed out only small batches of six or seven titles at a time, followed by months of no multichannel releases at all. The long-term commitment to SACD of audiophile labels such as Chesky and Telarc far outstripped Sony's own. Eventually, substantial chunks of the catalogs of Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, the Kinks, the Moody Blues, the Police, and the Rolling Stones were released on SACD, and the catalogs of the Doors and Neil Young are well represented on DVD-A.

Which I think is where I came in..— Steve Guttenberg Footnote 1: I beg to differ with Steve here; five full-range speakers is the only uncompromised format for multi-channel music playback, particularly in terms of matching the center channel to the front L/R speakers.— John Atkinson. I Agree with John Atkinson I am old enough to remember quad in fact, I remember first hearing it as 4 channel stereo in the UK by AR using 2 stereo Reel to reels in sync playing back though AR4s, I think, I was 17 and walked out of that demo thinking hi fis got a great future That was 1970, 43 years later and hi fi snobs are still banging on about stereo being three dimensional etc.

The files are made for 5.1 audio and if your speaker configuration is set to 7.1 or anything else, they will not sound like they are meant to. I have a 7.1 setup myself and if I play these tracks while the speaker configuration is set to 7.1, I just get some mono sound in all the side and rear speakers. Switch your speaker to 5.1 setting for the correctly defined surround sound.

He just walked off looking very perturbed. Multi channel IS better. There's no disputing it, no matter whether a 2-channel fanatic may refuse to admit or not. And I know most people believe DVD-Audio was a response to SACD, but it is actually the other way around. SACD wasn't even an idea Sony was kicking around when I came up with DVD-Audio. The reason people are confused is that right before DVD-A was about to be released, the copy protection codec for DVDs was broken and published on the internet.