Back in the 1970s I ran with 4 speakers and liked to crank it up. 2 front, 2 rear. No I didn't have quadrophonic, but some of my buddies did, and some of those records have been re-issued in the 5.1 format.
Are you happy with your Onkyo brand product? Which model AVR do you have?
I have the tx-nr1010. Overall, yes, I've been happy with it. There were days I did regret the purchase. It replaced an NAD 762 that failed after about 10 years.
I had used the NAD for a livingroom and bedroom (audio only zone 2) in a condo.
My first surprise with the Onkyo was all the input -> output weirdness.
With the NAD, whatever was playing in the main zone was always available as a stereo down-mix for zone 2. Not so with the Onkyo, you pretty much have to connect all the matching analog inputs... lot's more wires. (More and more HDMI sources don't even have analog outputs.) I got everything I wanted working eventually and overall it sounded pretty good.
Before long, I had my first HDMI board failure. Off to the factory for repairs.
After a few years I moved to a house. In the house I had pre-wired speakers for every room and bought a Russound multi-room controller.
I also put CAT6 runs for HDMI so that I could put a video zone 2 in a room. Integration of the Onkyo became a good deal more complicated and the input -> output weirdness is even more of a thing to deal with. If you use Zone 2 HDMI, it turns out that it's like the HDMI board is a matrix switch that is built in, but isn't connected to anything else in the chassis. I would have expected that the audio from the selected zone 2 source HDMI would also be coming out the zone-2 pre-out, but no. I wanted to route the audio to the russound for that room but no analog output of it is available... even if the source has stereo analog connected. (This is when I missed the lip-sync setting and resorted to an outboard solution.) Anyway, I bought an audio extractor to get the audio off the zone 2 hdmi, and again I was able to have everything working as I would expect. Also, I ended up using the "zone 3" outputs set on "source" as the stereo output for what is playing in the the main room, but again for that to work there must be analog stereo inputs connected for every source.
In less than a year after the house move and dealing with this setup headache, the HDMI board failed again. Off to the factory for repairs, and I swore it would be the last time. Here we are 5 years later, it's still working. I've started to shop thinking it doesn't have much life left. ;-)
While I understand the Onkyo quirks, I'm probably not buying another one. There seemed to be a good deal more thought put into the design of the NAD while the Onkyo was an exercise in heaping features into a box with too little thought of how they would be used. I have been happy with its sound and overall performance. Playing some of the few concert blurays and DVDs that were well recorded can really deliver something very close to a real concert experience. Yes, Hell Freezes Over can still be jaw dropping. John Mayer and Dave Mathews / Tim Reynolds are a few others definitely worth listening to if you like their music. I'm definitely on the lookout for more well done multi-channel content. All suggestions appreciated.
I'm very likely to re-do a bunch of things in the next year or two. For one, I want to add another room and I will wire it for HDMI and stereo sound.
I'm just going to get a stand alone 4x4 HDMI Matrix switch (that has analog and digital audio outputs). I also now require that my main 7.1 controller has 7.1 analog inputs so that I can add an 8 channel external DAC if I want to. I'm leaning toward a Rotel RSP 1576 MKII but honestly I may just pick up a used 1572 to see how that goes. I already have one of their Class-D 7 channel amps on hand to pair with it. My main room is going from 5.1 to 7.1. With the outboard switch I can just connect the individual sources to the Russound directly (leaving only Russound Source 1 as what is playing in the main room).
It just seems better, and more flexible, to separate the HDMI switch out and keep the "main room's" 7.1 system untangled from the other rooms.
My house is small and the other rooms will never warrant anything other than stereo sound. Frankly, I don't even care to have a TV in my master bedroom(though I did install a wire for it), I put the additional video zones in the guest room(s) because I know a lot of people watch TV in bed.
You caught me during my morning coffee... sorry, I guess I've "gone on" a little. It seemed like a simple question, right? ;-)