Spent the morning shining up my system, biwiring with fresh cables, repositioning the speakers a bit and toeing them in, flipping through old cds, etc etc.... generally what a lad likes to do on a sunday morning... popped in an old cd by Roger Waters called 'Amused to Death'... now this cd would really stack up as solid evidence in the 'good two channel is better than mediocre multi-channel' debate... my brain could not for the life of me detect where some of those sounds were coming from! Material seemed to be popping up from around the back corners of the room, the right and left walls, behind me... i had to get up a couple of times to make sure that i wasn't in fact hearing noises from adjacent rooms.
i think part of it has to do with the fact that i've toed in my speakers so that the imaginary line from the speakers to the listening position intersects a little before the listener as opposed to a little behind, and the speakers are now facing moreso towards the opposite room corners than before... it was quite a lot of fun. the last time i heard this cd was a few years ago on a 'mid-fi' system, and i didn't experience this effect at all on that system.