chipped, when you played your music in multi-channel format, was it through your receiver's digital DSP manipulation, which creates pseudo multi-channel from any two-channel material?
Or were you actually listening to a SACD disc or DVD-Audio disc that was mixed and engineered in multi-channel?
Seems to me your disappointment is in either the recorded material's multi-channel mix or your receiver's pseudo multi-channel option.
Admittedly, I'm a two channel guy at heart. I don't bother much with multi-channel music. I do have several DVD-Audio and SACD discs that have multi-channel mixes and I have given it a try. But for some reason it doesn't appeal to me much.
Maybe someone else who is much more knowledgeable of surround sound, can provide some more insight.
I can tell you what my buddy and I did once. We took all of his speakers from his 5.1 HT/music system and stacked them across the front.
In other words, we left the center channel and front Left/Right floorstanders exactly where they were and we added the two rear surrounds...to the front. We placed them roughly a half meter (a foot and a half) to the outside of the front Left/Right floorstanders.
It was quite interesting. It took a bit of fiddling with the placement, but I thought it worked well in his living room, because he had a very large and wide room. As well as fairly deep. Quite a wall of sound.
I thought that was a fun experiment to try.
