Re: Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL?

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In Reply to: Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL? posted by Guest on May 7, 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.

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Kimber Kable

Follow Ups Full Thread

Topic - Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL? - Guest 13:13:05 05/07/03 (5)

confused -- do you have any budget? - chris e. 03:26:50 05/18/03 (1)

Re: confused -- do you have any budget? - Guest 10:08:10 05/27/03 (0)

Re: Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL? - sam9 11:10:37 05/10/03 (2)

Thank you! - Guest 08:05:46 05/12/03 (1)

Re: Thank you! - sam9 23:12:21 05/12/03 (0)

Follow Ups

Re: Should ctr be ESL if main front are ESL? - sam9 11:10:37 05/10/03 (2)

Thank you! - Guest 08:05:46 05/12/03 (1)

Re: Thank you! - sam9 23:12:21 05/12/03 (0)

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