O.K., I bought an SACD/DVD-A player last week. I really like it except.... I the 7.1 speaker model as I understood it 3 speakers up front, 2 rear, 2 on the side. The ones on the side maybe dipole. I REALLY like my setup for home theater/ 2-channel audio. Now I'm doing 5 channel audio and I would rather have rear channel handleing audio instead of sides which are dipole.

I'm assuming there is no way to swith 6 channel analog on the 950 redirecting outputs to the rear speakers? If not is there an external way of doing this? Some sort of external switch that I could redirect side channel output to rears?

I just thought someone else might have encountered this obstacle before me. Thanks for your time.

If you think of where surround speakers are supposed to be set-up, the sound on multi-channel audio discs is really not supposed to end up in the rear channels. And you're right, it isn't really supposed to end up in your side surrounds. Uhh, now I see the problem.

I have heard that the rear surrounds actually can work very nicely as bipole speakers. If your side speakers are switchable, which many multi-pole speakers are, you may want to switch them to bipole and make them the rear surround channels. That way you can use the monopole speakers on the sides which should probably give you the best sound for both movies and music.

You can always swap out the speaker cables, but that's a pain. Umm, I don't believe there's an internal way of switching it, but I don't own a 950 so maybe somebody else knows.

You have a raised, at least in my mind, a nice little quandry. How do you get the best of the 5 plus speaker modes yet still maintain a speaker set-up that benefits multi-channel audio? I know, before they even post it, use Logic 7. How about if you don't want to do any extra processing??

http://www.russound.com/speaker_selectors.htm

One of these speaker selector boxes could be wired to your rear channel amp output, to send the audio to the sides or rears.

You might try the surrounds as the side speakers for 5.1 audio. I understand that you might not think it's the "correct" way, but as you move those speakers around to the rear, imaging suffers, and as you go off-axis from your ears themselves, IMO, the sound quality deteriorates. Or, try it both ways and see what you think. I just leave mine on the sides, and I'm happy enough.