Originally Posted by Agent
Its still being played in Stereo though. I'm not talking about "pseudo-surround" in the sense of running it through pro-logic or other such voodoo - just plain old mirrored front and back.
Not really sure how it can alter the sound?
It's stereo, but not as is was intended to be reproduced. As Lowe says, you can have cancellation issues to start with. But the whole idea of stereo soundstaging is that you have the music in front of you, as you would at a gig, and you should be able to pick out where the individual instruments are. With speakers at the side, or behind you, you can't. I'm sure a lot of folk don't give a hoot about soundstaging, hence why I said do it whatever way sounds best to your lugholes.
But 2.0 is the ideal way for stereo, so that's why most AV amps will pass it through that way by default, rather than by feeding it to all the available speakers. Even with music DVD's, many are either 2.0, 2.1, or 5.1 with the music coming through the front two and ambient noise through the rest. Multi-channel audio is usually always 5 discrete channels.
What do you think multiple speakers add over two speakers?
Its no different to putting another 2 speakers on the 2 outputs you have an a normal Hi-fi and putting them behind you.
Aye, and that's a bad idea too
If 4 speakers sounded good in any way with music, quadraphonic wouldn't have died out in the 70's.
And Quadraphonic was, in theory, better, being 4.0 rather than two sets of 2.0.
Attatching 4 speakers to two speaker outputs really isn't a good idea, in any way I can think of. It's certainly detrimental to sound quality, hence why you can't buy hi-fi's with 4 speakers! Even if the speakers are matched you still risk damaging the amp, or the speakers if the amp is driven hard. If you're very lucky you won't have any damage at all. If you're lucky the amp will just overheat and switch off. If you're unlucky you could blow the amp, and knacker the tweeters (maybe woofers too) in the speakers. If you had an impedance matching speaker box you'd be fine, but not many people have those kicking about, and it'd likely sound poor anyway!
If you have 2 sets of speaker outputs, that's better, but the only use I'd see for that would be parties, when spreading sound around is desirable.