I'll try to make this brief.
I was a surround sound enthusiast. I had purchased Paradigm Studio 100 v2, from reading reviews it was the best bang for my small budget. I decided to keep my monitor 9 which they were suppose to replace, because to my ears more speakers sounded better.
Originally I had the speakers placed on the short walls in my long narrow room. With the 100's in the front and 9's in rear. A problem however was the av/receiver and receivers I had couldn't power the 100's. I purchased a Yamaha av/receiver which powered everything. Finally when I had the funds I purchased a used 3B ST to power the 100's. My jaw hit the floor as the 100's came to life. It also took the strain off the av/receiver and the other speakers sounded better.
I listened in this front back configuration for some time. I became annoyed by the narrow sound, and realized from reading blogs of audiophiles that I wasn't getting a proper stereo image.
So I decided to try using the room length wise with floor standing speakers in the corners. Which was much better, but with the speakers so far apart there was this huge hole in the middle, which I solved by placing bookshelf speakers near the center of the room. Floor standers would have been too close due to the narrowness of the room.
Eventually I got around to placing all the speakers along the long wall, which had this awesome wall of sound effect. I had the problem of speaker localizing, so when the funds permitted I purchased another Bryston to keep the sound coherent along with keeping the same brand of speakers.
A good multi-channel pre-amp is out of my price range. So I have to make do with the Yamaha. By accident I sat on the remote activating the enhancer. To my surprise multi-channel stereo sounded better than multi-channel sacd, and I haven't looked back!
