Some others around here (such as Soundhound) may be able to help more on this, but the way I understand 6.1 (including the 1050's Surround 6.1, the 950's Cirrus Extra Surround, and Dolby Digital EX), the surround channels are reduced by 3dB because some of the information is being re-routed to the surround back channel(s). Taken from this article : "Surround Centre information is split equally between Surround Left and Surround Right with a drop of 3dB (needed to maintain a correct level when the signal is extracted)"



If the Surround 6.1 processing is kicking in automatically (as it seems to be on Chamber of Secrets), I certainly agree. But this problem originally appeared on three different movies in late 2001, and none of them seemed to override the user and automatically enable Surround 6.1. Hence the confusion (at least on my part) with this issue recently.

For people with 6.1 speaker setups who are still experiencing some trouble, it may be possible to re-visit their speaker calibration to make sure they have things balanced well. If the surrounds are a little on the low side or the surround back is low, it would not be surprising at all for the entire rear soundstage to wimp out on you in Surround 6.1. I can't guarantee that it'll solve the problem, but it's worth a try if you haven't tried it already.

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