What music are you listening to in surround mode, exactly?I have to say my Crown amp does a fantastic job. It creates no hiss from my speakers and it will wake up my Martin Logans real quick. But, as always, I just can't get into dinosaur old stereo sound. Whenever I go into surround music mode it just makes a huge difference in sounding live/realistic and much more enjoyable. Stereo just needs to die out like cassette tapes. I am always amazed at so many people listening to stereo music on expensive systems. Now a fully treated room and a very good setup will sound very, very good. But you can get nearly to that point with surround music at about 20% of the cost. The industry has really latched on to the resurgence of stereo. It allows them to make a lot of money fairly easily. If a major manufacturer like Yamaha or Denon came out with a great AVR with a decent SNR number of say 100?, Many people would try the AVR and be happily surprised at the great sound. All you need is a 5.1/5.2 or 7.1/7.2 to get up and running. Atmos? Who cares for music. It really is not that hard. I think the resurgence in stereo has slowed the advancement of surround sound by quite a bit. But, in the end, this is just my opinion.
Music recorded in 5.1/7.1? Or are you just running 2.0 music through something that attempts to upmix it to 5.1/7.1? I've found "surround mode" for 2.0 music on AVRs to be a gimmicky joke at best and it's not for me. But, that's obviously totally subjective and I'm not saying you're wrong to prefer it... I certainly do a lot of things the greybeards on this forum would laugh at.
Setting subjective preferences aside...
The objective problem with surround setups... well, an objective problem... is that for a given budget, you divide your budget among 5 or 7 speakers instead of 2.
Proper surround setups are also a pain in the neck to shoehorn into many/most living situations.