EAD 8 channel upgrade?

Well, I'm still going to be 5.1 for a while. I won't go 7.1 until I get a dedicated room. I'm coming from a first generation Encore that I bought used from it's original owner. It was about 2.5 years old, had the old display, first remote and first version software. So I'll see huge improvements not considering the 8 channels. If I had a newer Ovation or Ovation +, I might wait also. But at the price I got the Encore for + the price of the upgrade, I'm still getting an Ovation 8 for less than the price of a new Encore so I went ahead and jumped on it. As I had time to listen to the Encore for 2 weeks before I sent it in, I'll sure post my results here when I get it back. Hopefully some others will chime in also.

I have an ovation and have not sent it in for the software upgrade (yet). Two reasons: speaker placement will be difficult in my odd shaped room and I really question how much I will get out of it based on there not being in software that supports these channels--it's currently all interpretive. I am very interested in what your (and others) experience is, both sonically and from a reliability standpoint.