I can kind of see where Ashley was headed at the beginning, but then he just went way of course. From my understanding he used to be a projectionist in the early 80's for a small theater in Bournemouth when simulated surround sound came out and the light kind of went on, but for him, he felt he could take it to the next level and be ahead of the game. Only one problem is the sound engineers were decades ahead of him and came out with dedicated 5.1 channel sound while he was still matrixing his original mono and stereo sources and somehow convinced himself that what he was doing was better than dedicated 5.1 channel.
We asked him years ago about DD/DTS and he said it had it's place but felt what he did was far more immersive. I do have to give him credit, when I saw PLiiz and saw the height channels, it was Ashley who I thought of, but as mentioned PLiiz matrixed (properly mind you) the height channels from the main channels, where as Ashley has leaped ten paces back to make one step forward and is too stubborn to realize what he is doing is wrong. For the size of his small room, he would be so much better with a straight DD/DTS track and five or seven speakers and call it a day, but what he has done is downgrade the signal from 5.1 to a stereo source and then matrix from there. He could be going from the good ol days of PCM stereo which in some cases had a higher bitrate that 5.1 but those discs are far and few between.
He refuses to listen to reason, refuses to try out Bluray lossless (not that he could afford Bluray to begin with) I don't have an issue with what he is doing and if he likes it fine, my issue is when he tries to "teach" new members (which he tried to do far too often at Sound and Vision) and new members were getting so confused because he would tell them something so completely way off base and then when other members tried to correct him, he would get very argumentative and slanderous, meanwhile the new member would think we all were off our rockers and leave. That to me would irk me the most.
Even today if you read his posts over at AVS, he still does it today and it just infuriates me. I stopped posting over at AVS because he would complain to the mods that i was harrassing him (when I would just correct him again) and I would get banned and he would be allowed to post. he has been banned many times over there, but I can read his posts under new names and just kind of gave up over there. The man is clearly not running on all cylinders and can only hope he has a parole officer watching over him before he hurts somebody. And yes the cat has already suffered fractured rear legs (he claims from the cat jumping off the couch, but I sure find that hard to believe. )
