Why not use mains as centers

thank you,I will try no center and see how it sounds.I appreciate all the feedback.

I use a set of Klipsch KG5.5 as my rear LR and a single KG5.5 as my center with Khorns as my LR. the full range speaker works great but i have the room to do this in as my front projector screen sits in front of the center speaker.

OK, tried the "phantom" center yesterday, and I hate to say this, but it didn't sound good at all. Very hollow sounding, I tried some other setting changes, but just turning the center on again was a huge improvment.

Since I don't listen to multi channel music, I kept my excellent Definitive Tech CLR 2500 center with the powered 8" sub in it, from a previous system, great speaker.

Actually, when I downsized my AV system to just video based a few years back, I got rid of my high end 2 channel stuff and just used a reciever and bought all Def Tech speakers (BP 7004's for mains) with no sub. Just used the subs built into the 7004's and that system sounded very, very good. I'm a huge Def Tech fan now, maybe the best value I have seen in speakers.

>OK, tried the "phantom" center yesterday, and I hate to say this, but it didn't sound good at all. Very hollow sounding, I tried some other setting changes, but just turning the center on again was a huge improvment.

You probably have main speaker / room interface problems, most likely stemming from speaker placement relative to the walls (four feet off the front wall and a few feet to side walls is a nice place to start) and large objects (like a one-piece television; upgrading to front projection is in the top 3 things I've ever done for better audio performance).

A receiver with Audyssey equalization may be a reasonable work around for the problem.

You might get a bass boost at low frequencies with a phantom center (power response sums 6dB over a single speaker's output versus 3db at higher frequencies) although otherwise there shouldn't be a difference for listeners seated dead center between a phantom image and center channel.