Best Way To Test New Surround Sound System?
 

So I just got a new Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound set for my home. Certain ayu songs I've played like WE WISH sound really awesome, and sounds that were very faint in the background before have become very prominent.

Anyway...for all you audiophiles, how can I get the most out of this system to listen to my ayu songs? I'm open to trying different presets, equalizer settings, etc.

Zeke...I'm kind of looking at you. LOL and anyone else who is an audiophile, I greatly appreciate your input!

Also...I was looking at ayu's blu-rays and most of them are just PCM 2.0 and I'm like...WTF avex? I can't even get most of the concerts and PV collections in DD 5.1? EXTREMELY disappointing. There were a few concerts that were 5.1 but only like two or three. LAME!

Anyway, thank you all for your input! I can't wait to experiment with this!

RAINBOW and My story dvd audio.
Think only RAINBOW is 5.1. Not sure abt the rest on the album.

I think there were also some Blu-ray audio releases... and that high res Love songs USB wav set.

I have those on the way now :wink

Surprised I did not already own them. LOL what about apple lossless or FLAC? Ideally, what type of music file is best? And what music player is the best? Currently I use iTunes for audio and VLC for video.

I think only Arena Tour 2009 3D has real 5.1 sound with voice in central channel

Audiophiles will tell you that unless the source material was mastered in 5.1, a surround sound system can actually make things worse as a general-purpose sound processing algorithm that tries to take a 2-channel source and make it sound like it's coming from 5 distinct directions can't make better decisions than a sound engineer.

This is like people who think an upconverting Blu-ray player will make their DVDs look better because it outputs at higher resolution, without realizing that the extra information is simply not there to begin with. You can resize an image and then apply edge detection algorithms to it to increase its sharpness all you want - it's not going to "look better" by any measurable means.

That said, perception is subjective--if you try different settings and to you something sounds better than the original, than by all means, use that, enjoy, and forget what everybody else is telling you.