Is it possible to shield unshielded speakers?

I have the same question that Litsa123 had last month, only modified a little.

I have an older non-shielded floor-standing single speaker that I picked up used. To me, it's a quality speaker (B+W DM640) and I wish to do an experiment and use it as a center channel, set just slightly off to the side of my TV, a new Sony Trinitron 32 Inch.

Things aren't set up yet, and I won't go with this plan if it will damage the new TV. Is there something I can wrap around the speaker that will sacrifice looks but protect my TV? The room is large and the L-R vintage speakers will be three or four feet away at least from the TV, and so I'm not going to worry about them as much (although I haven't researched how far away things have to be, according to whatever guidelines HT users have found).

There seemed to be disagreement in this thread as to whether wrapping aluminum foil or something around the speaker would help. Does anyone have any insight on that, or any other wrapping?

jl

I'd just move the center channel a foot-or-so away from the TV. This should do it.

Is that really all it takes? Boy, I guess I was worried about not-much. I can't afford to lose my expensive equipment, but if all I have to do is separate things by a foot (or 2, for good measure) then that will be excellent.

Joshl: The speaker magnets won't damage your T.V.
The T.V. picture will be distorted if it's too close to a magnetic field.

Dweller is right -- to expand on that just a little, I've always noticed the distortion on the edges/corners of the picture. The color may be saturated or the picture distorted. Even small distance separations can make a big difference since the strength of the magnetism increases on a squared basis with distance.

BTW, I presented the aluminum foil idea as a hypothesis above. More knowledgeable members shot that one down, so I wouldn't encourage anyone to follow that route. To reassure yourself, just put some aluminum foil on the outside of the speaker box -- surface closest to the TV. If there is no change, you've only wasted a few seconds of your time.