Centre Speaker : Will a decent stereo speaker cut it

Skill Magill

or does it have to be a "centre" speaker? Would the sound be discernible to warrant the extra spend? (~€130).
I have 2 floorstanders, an active sub and 2 other 100w speakers at the moment, but no centre.
For home theatre / 5.1 surround

Idleater

I haven't used any centre channel in years. If you have gotten by thus far why do you want one now?

To answer your question, the best centre channel speaker you can get sound wise, is one identical to your front left/right, at the same height.

Official centre channel speakers are aligned horizontally for aesthetic and space considerations mostly.

Skill Magill

Thanks Idle, its a new system I'm building up, capable of 7.1 surround, so I wanted to add speakers to the channels I'm not using. I could come across some second hand speakers to fill these channels and keep one of them in the upright position as centre, for the same price as a dedicated centre speaker. What do you reckon?

Idleater

The problem as it were with a dedicated centre channel is that it is quite important from an audio mix point of view. The movie track that is sent to that channel contains most of the audio as well as a mix of what is sent to the left and right channels.

Because of this, the dispersion pattern of the waves interact with those of the actual left and right channels and can cause interference and dead spots depending on where you are sitting.

You can mitigate this somewhat with room normalising software built into some amps and hardware, or by using the same speaker to line up the dispersion of the sound waves in as similar a fashion as possible.

All this is theory though, and probably only noticeable to those with dedicated clean room home cinemas with no corners, open spaces, or uneven surfaces to contend with. The rest of us make do with a compromise between what looks right and what sounds acceptable. A good example of the latter is the sound bar which looks well but has a significantly comprimised sound.

The happy medium for most people is the horizontal centre speaker. To lessen the interference, one thing you can do is to enable the "small" setting for that speaker in your amp if you have that. This will limit the left right mix sent to that speaker, leaving it mostly audio.

garancafan

@Idleater

Which, in your view, would give the better results in a simple set-up, a soundbar or a single centre speaker?

Skill Magill

Ok, so I'd want to be careful adding a centre that is not the same as the left and right speakers, ie i have a pair of monitor m4 floorstanders and monitor have a dedicated centre for these speakers. By putting in a different make of centre this could lead to dead spots as it wouldn't have been made and tested by monitor.
I'd hate to compromise the sound so I will get the monitor centre to compliment the system. I know down the line I would probably have ended up buying it anyway! (It would annoy me knowing that the "proper" speaker wasn't installed)

Anyway thanks for the post, I think I made sense of it, who'd have thought there was so much to it!