Surround sound is and forever will be a niche. Just like "Gold Discs" and "SHM-CD" and other ideas that the public never will or could truly embrace, it is there for those that have the inclination to go the extra mile. Buy the extra equipment, spend the extra money for the premium content, create the space, deal with the lack of software, etc. The Quadraphonic era of the '70s failed because the technology was sub par upon release and only got good enough when the record companies and the public bailed. Too many early formats that really did little. The best quad was on eight track and reel to reel. One format the public battled with and the other it could not afford. In the late '90s when DVD-A was born it was derailed out of the gate by the copy protection being defeated (which kept DVD-A out of every DVD player made at launch), and Sony being Sony leaving the group and forcing multichannel onto its already released SACD product - creating a format war when one should have been avoided. The biggest issue was that by the time DVD-A and SACD began to feed the marketplace, the iPod came along and music was now in your pocket, a LOT of music was in your pocket. Headphones replaced the living room stereo, and today a Bluetooth Speaker IS the "stereo" in a huge percentage of homes. Walk into a home or apartment and you will probably not see a receiver, CD/BluRay player and speakers, a mainstay of homes for decades. This is a fact of the time. Just as the quad years, the labels pretty much stopped their output of surround product. Sony remarkably abandoned their mainstream SACD release program for the horrible "DualDisc", and WEA shifted from DVD-A to DualDisc as well, and then MVI and DVD-V for their enhanced releases, and the niche became a mouse hole. However, there have been remarkable releases since then from artists like The Beatles, Yes, Tom Petty, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, King Crimson, Steven Wilson, Coldplay, Love and Rockets, Pixies, Bob Marley, The Doors, Kraftwerk, Alan Parsons Project, Guns N' Roses and many more. Surround Music is a niche and requires product for people to support it and purchase it. The funny thing is the surround marketplace minority is very willing to spend money on physical product - something the download majority no longer feels is required. There is a message there somewhere.