You obviously want close to the same tonality between all your speakers in a surround setup. Else the immersion can be destroyed quickly.
I think there is tone and there is dispersion. I find my Bose 901’s to work tremendously well in my home theater even though the tonality isn’t consistent. The benefits of the wider dispersion is very beneficial. Taken in a different direction, Yamaha Cinema DSP preserves tonality but changes the soundfield to enhance immersion as well.
Can't multi-task in the theater like we can in the living room. For this reason, we watch many movies in the living room. My wife is always stitching something and I am well, watching you all in the forum.
+1
Nice soundbars like the Sonos Arc are relatively benign in appearance but are a clear step up over built in TV speakers. That said, I would bet these invisible speakers would beat a sound bar in “sound field” due to the ability to put the left and right speakers further apart.
Along those same lines, Yamaha had a really nice virtual surround feature. Besides working with 2 ch, they have a proprietary mode where you put your surround speakers in front and it they still try to simulate surround sound through generalized HRTF and phase tricks. Not perfect but
way better than 2 ch alone for movies.
Crutchfield isn’t the most reliable of reviewers but they have a very generous return policy, so if they over hyped this up they do take the hit of lots of customer returns.
When rear speakers are out of the picture, can simulated surround sound save the day?
www.crutchfield.com
They also have a pure virtual mode that works with 2 channels and isn’t the old CircleSurround SRS, or QSound effect and is still based upon the discrete channel information.