I also had the 5 channel sub setup demo using REL. I'm far from impressed and these guys seem to know their stuff. I probably need to change my expectations.
While REL is very tame for theater, I'm not unimpressed by REL. It's that the demo guys are right. When you have enough bass to feel an 18 wheeler tip over it drowns the center channel. My goal was to have enough bass to feel scared when watching movies, like fight or flight sensation. It wasn't easy to get the sub loud enough to feel the vibrations, but it did drown out the voices.
REL did very nice with music. When we cranked REL loud enough for a Mad Max to feel the rumble, the dialog was drowned out. They warned me about too much bass ahead of time.
The REL demo was weird, it opened me to think differently about a sub in a new dimension of space, literally. There was this song recorded by a singer with no music. It's like a church song. Without a sub it sounded fine, and then with the sub on I really couldn't hear much low frequency impact but all the sudden the room felt/sounded larger. The song didn't have a baseline to even know what I was hearing, yet the audio sounded more full and spaceous. I'm impressed.
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