Rene, In this specific case, what you're asking for is the ability to control how front channel content is distributed amongst the three front speakers. With matrix decoding of 2-channel material, implimenting this feature is not difficult nor unreasonable. I have no problem with more options.

The centre channel is going to be extracted using matrix decoding technology, which is not 100% perfect. At some point, the processing has to choose how much gets extracted. It's a balancing act: too much extraction and you collapse the front soundstage to the centre; too little extraction and you're stuck with the very phantom imaging you're trying to avoid.

Since this balance can vary by source and, more importantly, personal taste, it makes sense to let users control the extraction level. With movies you can set it higher for clean dialogue; for music you can set it lower for a more continuous front soundstage.

But in the case of discrete multi-channel, what you're asking for is the ability to literally create a personal of remix the front three channels. After all, the three channels are normally routed to their respective speakers with no use (or need) of processing. So what you want to do is redistribute the contents of those channels.

The solution for you might be to actually buy an inexpensive mixer, where three channels come in and three channels go out, but the content is remixed (with the mixing being controlled by you). Remixing the front soundstage is not a solution to problematic speaker dispersion, any more than it is for a speaker configuration bug. Those problems should be dealt with, not covered up. Huh? Since there is no discrete 7.1 content, how else can you play back 5.1-channel material on a 7.1-speaker set-up? What specifically do you find "silly" about using PLIIx on 5.1 sources. That's interesting. I guess I never associated "digital" or "analogue" as having any relation to something as arbitrary as number of channels. I've always viewed them as being orthogonal and really don't see what one has to do with the other. But that's just me.