Home theater without center channel? Opinions?

Plato
yes I am. I have to. My TX SR 805 won't allow me to utilize the rears unless I tell it surrounds are in use too. With no surrounds actually being attached and figuring that was not a good idea either, Onkyo support told me to use the surrounds as rears.

So I did... am.

I really wish you wouldnt spread the matching center myth.

Well that is what they do in all the mix and mastering studios. They might use a smaller speaker from the same manufacturer for rears but they always use the same across the front.

If your criticism is that this is overly stringent and purist then I agree - for most people it certainly is.

Ofcourse a commercial application would do this as they have the deep pockets for it plus the space for it but even then it could be done other ways if need.

Well, I was experimenting with speaker cables the other day, and I robbed the center channel cable in order to use it with the front L/R speakers. So I set the receiver for "none" on center speaker. I was surprised at how good it sounds without the center speaker, including a decent centering of dialog in the soundstage. My front towers are much bigger and go much lower than the center, so I guess that may be helping the overall sound. The thing is, if you have large, high quality towers for fronts, it is really hard and really expensive to integrate a center that is on par. I've tried several center speakers, but I never seem to be satisfied with the way dialog sounds through them-resonance in male and some female voices, resulting in indistince dialog. Maybe I just haven't tried a good enough center speaker.

I finally set up a 5.1 HT room, mostly 2 channel

center is a little more obvious than 2 ch front but blends well, you should be able to go either way

I'm using a newer B&W center with B&W Matrix 2's with no problem

I use the backs for the surrounds coming from an Arcam AVR350 (no HDMI audio 7.1 source)I go 5.1 speakers not 7.1

I will be going from a Pioneer BDP 05 Blu Ray with analog outs. Should I get 7.1 channel interconnects and then have the processor figure out how to reconfigure to 5.1 channel speaker configuration? thanks
thanks