gonk: I think that you are onto something here. You show some pretty sound logic.

As I posted on a different thread, just how do we come up with a "valid" metric for what is better?

Price alone is not necessarily a valid comparison, IMO.

Look at what some users and manufacturers say about speaker wire!

One thing you failed to realize is that when buying equipment traditionally you have a lot of overhead to pay for including salesmen’s salaries, rent for the shop you buy from, profit on the equipment that the shop expects to make and many other things. To give you some credit the Outlaw is worth what it is priced, but anything you buy from a second party is worth what it is priced minus everything listed above. Also the curve for pricing on audio gear in respects to performance is by no means a linear, but rather exponential in nature (depends on the buyer how exponential this curve is).

Just so people know, I was being sarcastic in my earlier reply. Pythagore's post is the most ridiculous post I have read in a while. Yeah, America is known for pricing things on target. Bose, Evian, printer ink, coffee, etc. And the pretend review? What does that even mean? Sorry if there was any confusion.

Jed, I total forgot to include things that are just a plain ripoffs like Bose and printer ink. Good call.

THANK GOD Jed . I thought you had lost your mind .

Just so you know, Jed M, I had faith that you were being sarcastic.

Thanks for the show of support Gonk! And E'pin, no worries, I lost my mind a long, long time ago.

Damn burnt my lip on my Starbucks.

Remember to get the more expensive lip balm Obie. Its obviously better.

Then PLIIx, with it's more benign processing, will be the better fit for your tastes than L7. You can adjust the processing to minimize the contributions of the centre and surround speakers. The results should sound similar to 2-speaker playback, only with a more stable soundstage.

BTW, I'm the opposite: I use L7 with music specifically because it doesn't sound like 2-speaker playback. If it did, I wouldn't see much point in using it (I'd just play it back through 2 speakers). That's because a human voice is not a phantom-imaged, comb-filtering, dual-mono sound. It is in fact a point source, coming from a single location. Unfortunately, we're so used to hearing it reproduced at home as a dual-mono source from a pair of speakers that we've come to accept that sound as normal.

One thing to try is slide your balance control all the way over to one speaker and face directly at it. Then play a mono male vocal (AM radio talk shows work well for this). Compare the voice through one speaker vs the same voice as a phantom image through both speakers. You can decide which sounds more like actual voices you've hear in real life.