Video Asylum

Posted by sam9 on May 10, 2003 at 11:10:37

In Reply to: Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL? posted by Guest on May 07, 2003 at 13:13:05:

I've been in the same quandry regarding Magnepans. Nothing will be quite as satisfactory as a matching center, however, I really can't afford the Magnepan center just now. I've tried a couple of alternatives. My impressions are as follows:

A- run of the mill bookshelf speaker won't do - it just sounds odd, especially for anyone not seated dead center.

B- Two mini (but high quality) speakers such as a pair of Gallo micro-spheres set in the center with each turned aboyt 30 deg from center are not too bad.

C- I also tried an RCA made speaker from RadioShack that uses a very good ribbon tweeter that supossedly radiates evenly over nearly 180 deg. This too is not bad.

(B&C were E-bay and garage sale scrounging.)

D- Do without. If you setup the AVR with center=none, the center signal gets split between left and right. With Magnepans, this is the smoothest sounding of options but with a couple of drawbacks: 1-When I setup my AVR this way, I cannot made any level adjustment to my "phantom center". This is mostly OK but can cause a problem with the dialog on some DVDs. 2-Multichannel music sometimes looses some imaging, although quite a few multichannel recordings don't use the center channel anyway.

If your main interest is watching DVDs, I wouldn't worry much about any of these so long as the dialog sounds OK. If you listen to a lot of multichannel music you may find the least compromising solution is to go without ("phontom center") until you can afford a matching ML center speaker.