When it comes to HT, stereo is fine for me. The screen is on one wall and the sofa is against the opposite wall, so rear speakers become "side" speakers, and positioned way too close to some listeners and too far from the other. Surround effects in a setup like that are very compromised at best, so I've made the decision to skip all that and have a good stereo setup.
For music, I'd say it's much easier to get your music out there these days. Go back a few decades, and most of the music on the shelves was in the form of LPs, which had a relatively large cost associated with producing them. As a result, the people that chose to finance the studio time, cutting the records etc could afford to be picky.
Recording equipment has got much cheaper recently. These days, a few hundred pounds will get you a pretty respectable microphone, and your average laptop can apply enough processing etc to make it a full production - drums, keys, guitar, whatever.
So, the cost of entry to recording music has fallen through the floor. Anyone with a laptop is now a mix/mastering engineer, and anyone that can bash out a few chords is a musician.
That doesn't mean modern music is bad, it just means that there's a stunningly large amount of it, and sifting through all the rubbish gets tedious.
The stuff that gets played on the radio is often very heavily processed, including auto-tune etc. The thing is, though, that these days if your studio doesn't have auto-tune, people won't book you. That's the state of play.
There's still good music being produced. Finding it is difficult, but with forums like this it can be made easier. If someone stumbles across something good, post about it!
If anyone's interested, I have a great example of how different a studio vs live performance can be. Find Isembard's Wheel on Spotify or whichever music platform you prefer. I was the recording/mixing/mastering engineer for all of the live performances on there at the moment. They were all taken from the same gig, which was upstairs in a small pub in Sheffield. I took a multi-track at the desk, and mixed it down later. No edits, no auto-tune. Bit of compression and a bit of EQ. In theory, the result should actually be pretty HiFi.
Compare those to the studio versions, where they had a wider range of equipment and processing, probably better mics, etc etc.
I am certainly biased, but I know which versions I prefer.
Chris
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