Upmixing 2 channel

Why use Dolby at all with 2.1?  Seems like you’re just adding a lot of additional processing that isn’t even necessary.  You’re totally on the right track looking for a stereo preamp, and depending on the quality of your 3-channel amp you might even consider an integrated stereo amp.  Best of luck moving forward.  It’s an ongoing process but well worth pursuing. 

I usually dont.  Just did it for kicks and it really sounded good. Now, after a more in depth listening session with a variety of music it may sound like crap. Im using an anthem 3 channel amp powering paradigms. 

Thanks 

I love the old R&B artists of the 60's IE temptations, Four Tops, et al. But Phil Specters wall of sound usually makes it unlistenable for me which is a bummer. I'm not sure how influential he was with Motown but I've got some that sound like Specter's work. 

I upmix all my music in my multichannel room from stereo for music listening ( with Dolby’s DSU, Auromatic, 360 reality, etc).

To optimally facilitate this for the codecs, you need to create a very seamless blended soundfield where no speaker can even be remotely localized, i.e. stretching from your fronts to surrounds behind you and beyond. Here are some tips that could help to acheive this.

- All speakers equidistant from you., i.e, no surrounds jammed right by your seat

In other words, you would require a larger room than for a typical 2 channel room

- Wide dispersion speakers can help

- After you run autocals for accurate delay/distance settings, you may need to manually fine tweak individual speaker level settings, disable auto peq and manually tune any peq depending on your room’s characteristics.

When you have all of it dialed in, you should be able to get an incredible listening experience. The first thing you may start to notice is that you will hear all kinds of detail you have never heard in stereo... just by virtue of how these codecs function, unpack a stereo recording and put it on the huge enveloping soundfield.

Then there is the disappearance of the room, all speakers, etc and only the music left all around you and all inside of you etc, i.e., a drug of unmatched caliber 😂.

Sounds fantastic. Also sounds like a bit above my skill level and probably budget too.  I have a multi use room.  Sounds like u have a kick ass theater room.  I geuss lesson is to optimize calibration and speaker placement. Is room set up what u do?

If you have access to the Neo modes I find them superior to Dolby Surround. Also, there are now Dolby Music modes which I haven’t played with very much.

Sounds fantastic. Also sounds like a bit above my skill level and probably budget too. I have a multi use room. Sounds like u have a kick ass theater room. I geuss lesson is to optimize calibration and speaker placement. Is room set up what u do?

Typically, the higher end multichannel processors from Yamaha, Marantz, Trinnov, etc with the tools to achieve such results are designed with the professionals (integrators) in mind. They are the guys one pays to help them out. But, you don’t really need them if you can tinker and learn for a bit each time over a few months. The multichannel nerds tend to exist more on avsforum, quadrophonicquad, audiosciencereview, etc than Audiogon. For many of your technical questions that arise while you’re poking around inside these devices, there may be a existing thread somewhere.

Thanks much for the feed back. Ive never heard of neo mode or dolby music. Are those features on your avr