Okay, first, my complaint that the environmental sounds are louder than the voices has absolutely nothing to do with how many audio channels were recorded. It has to do with the fact that the voices are mixed too low. Period. Second, the fact that I can fix this by turning up the center channel is just a fortunate artifact of how audio is mixed these days. My point is that it should be mixed properly to begin with and those people that like to struggle to make out what's being said should be the ones forced to turn down their center speakers.

And there's not a phase problem. Oddly enough, my reciever takes those old mono programs and pushes them through more than one speaker, and since I can understand them fine, that's not the issue. Also, I have the same problem with the new stereo that I had with the old one with different speakers and different speaker cabling. And I just hooked the new one up and took care to make sure I didn't swap phases.