Ok, let's see if I got this right. I set up a 5.1 ADAM nearfield system in my mix area so I could get the most accurate mix environment possible. Now we have people designing speakers with matrixes to eliminate the exact placement of sound so as to provide a more pleasent spacial effect. Why do I even bother to mix things with any concern for placement, since it will never be heard as the producer and artist wanted.
Most of these were abominations and sounded pretty bad. Remember years ago when Leslie tried to sell home speakers with rotating baffles to "distribute" the sound? Then there was Bose with their system, where you couldn't really tell where a sound was located. Then Polk designed a system which "cross-mixed" signals to the left and right speaker. I used to call that MONO! I've heard the Dolby system which simulates surround using 2 speakers. Not very convincing to me. Bose also has the same thing. I want the "ping-pong" effect, if that's what I'm trying for, and certainly don't want some synthetic matrix system determining what I hear.
Years ago, I heard a system using a pair of Maggies in front and back with the back pair being driven by a AudioPulse digital delay. It sounded very realistic on some material, and totally wrong on others. Still, the straight 2 channel stereo from the front pair sounded just fine.
I've also heard true Ambisonic playback, and built several of the decoders from Wireless World back in the 70's. That seemed to be the best solution, and I am somewhat sorry it never caught on.
Any speaker system that "changes" the sound to make it less accurate in either tone, placement, level, etc., is just plain wrong in my book. Since all playback systems are wrong to some extent, I try to choose the lesser of the evils and go with the system which gives me the most honest version of what it's fed, and accept the output, warts and all.
The concept of using M/S decoding for playback destroys any semblance of what the original program sounded like. It's great for recording, depending on the acoustics of the location, and when decoding to left and right for the mix, you can make artistic choices as to the "size" of the stage, and how the performance is "meant" to be heard. I see modifying this parameter to be equally bad as someone who has their tone controls cranked full on, "because it sounds better".
Jim Zuehsow