I totally understand why they don’t use a center channel. I’ve been to audio shows and listened to plenty of high-end 2 channel systems. I know what they can do. A center channel used the way I use it does something they can’t do.
@asctim Uh, so what you’re saying is these high-end speaker manufacturers spend a ton of $$$ to hump their gear to various audio shows and choose to set them up in a way that’s sub optimal? If they thought their very expensive speakers sounded better with a center speaker, along with the added prospect of being able to sell more of their center speakers, don’t you think they’d do so? Or are you just smarter and know more than they do about their own products?
The only ways I’ve found that work for me to my satisfaction are to either use a divider wall between two speakers that comes all the way up to my face to keep the speakers from playing into the wrong ear, or use an array of 3 speakers that are fairly close together and employ channel summing in the center and differencing on the side speakers.
I’ll just repeat, I can’t even. Let me ask you this — when you’re at a live concert how do you prevent the strings on the left from bleeding over into the woodwinds on the right? Do you bring your own personal divider with you to make it sound more “right” to you? To each his own I guess.
