That is certainly the trend. I used to have tube amps for all my speakers, surround and all, but it simply got unmanageable, not to mention HOT!

Generally, people who invest in tube gear are more concerned with quality music reproduction, and that is still stereo. Surround music didn't catch on (at least with SACD and DVD-A), but it is still up in the air if the new video formats will be used to popularize surround music.

From my own experience, I am tremendously unimpressed with surround mixes from a artistic taste point of view. There are some good ones like Dark Side of the Moon, but there are also some really unmusical ones.

I've done several surround mixes myself, and always am thinking it's a rather pointless exercise, because it doesn't really add anything beyond stereo from a musical point of view, i.e. serving the music rather than the technology.

The problem with surround is that we are used to music being presented historically in a front-centric manner (the Berlioz Requiem notwithstanding). Instruments coming from all directions behind the listener is generally unnatural. If the surrounds are used for ambience only, there is the feeling that those channels are not contributing "enough" to justify the extra channels.

As an aside, in my own system, for the playback of selected CDs, I've taken two studio reverb units and assigned one to the side surrounds and one to the back surrounds. I load slightly different programs into each, with the rear surrounds having a more "deep" ambience program than the sides, with more delay. This combination is able to simulate the reverb field as well as that on most classical SACDs, and affords a lot of flexibility in tailoring the relative size of the "room".

Of course this reverb processing can be switched out, and I never use it with vinyl playback, since a record tick reverberating into the surrounds is very unnatural!

Actually, in a many multi-channel releases, the reverb field in the surrounds is created in just this manner.