Btw started off in AV via Nicam VHS player into the amp and speakers either side of the TV. Funny if we are now going back to that
That's exactly how I started too
Interesting article, and I have been heading down this path for about the last 15 years.
I started my AV journey, as mentioned above, with a Nicam stereo VHS player plugged into a stereo amp. I then went through a Yamaha DSP A592 DOlby Pro-logic amp, an Arcam AV50 (plus Alpha 8 power amp) with a Pioneer 606D DVD player plugged in via 6 cables for Dolby Digital, then settled on Arcam Alpha 10 DAVE DD/DTS amps, which lasted me over 15 years, before I replaced them with a NAD 758v3 last year.
About 10 years ago, I took down my rear surround speakers to do some decorating, and never put them back up. I found that I didn't really miss them much. A good quality front soundstage, including a quality subwoofer gave me the vast majority of what I wanted. SO, I ran a 3.1 system for a while. Then, I turned the centre speaker off, and found that I preferred the sound - for one thing, pans didn't travel down below the screen, then back up again (I had the classic LCR setup of identical LR speakers to the left and right of the screen, and identical C speaker below it). SO, I was down to 2.1.
At this point, I started looking into whether I could get an integrated stereo system with HDMI inputs, room correction, and bass management. It looked like there were a number of contenders, but when I looked closer, I found a big problem. All of these stereo amps (with the sole exception of the Arcam SR250) only accepted a stereo input. They did not do any DD or DTS decoding themselves - even the ones with HDMI inputs. Not a problem, I thought, as you can simply set your Blu-ray player, or TV, or media player, to downmix the multi-channel signal to stereo, output it over HDMI, and let the amplifier do its bass management to output to speakers and subwoofer without losing anything other than the surround steering.
Wrong.
The
Dolby Metadata Guide, in the section on downmixing, says that: "
In all downmixes, the LFE channel is not included. "
Note, this isn't talking about bass management done by an AV Receiver or Processor. It is talking about a source device like a Blu-ray player or TV.
So, unless I am mistaken, using one of these two channel systems (except for the Arcam SR250) means that you will be missing out on the LFE channel from the programme. And that's why I went for an AVR for my current 2.1 system.