Need for high quality powered center

Erik,

Why the need for active speaker in the center?  I power my center from the HT reciever like most people and am pretty happy.  I power my fronts with my 2 channel amp for a nice improvement.

Jerry

@carlsbad2 

I don't use a receiver in my main rig, I use a pre/pro. My preference is to have the amplification internal. It is biamped internally with an active crossover. It means less amp and speaker wires for my rack.  I agree that you can get a good result with a receiver and a passive soeaker. The active route is nice with everything dedicated for that speakers drivers. YMMV.

I’m just wondering who’s your target market and what’s your price point (sorry if I just missed this info somewhere)? Knowing you I’d have to think this is a higher-performance — and likely an excellent — product, but at that level people tend to like to match their center speaker and amps so thinking that might be a tough sell so just curious what your thoughts are along these lines. Also, I’d love to see some pix of whatever ya got along with specs, components, etc., and I’d be happy to give you a shoutout to potential customers I happen to find wherever. This seems like a labor of love, and I’m all in on stuff like that!

Hey @soix - That’s the consideration. Honestly I’ve said (multiple times) on this forum that attempting to survive as a speaker builder as a small time maker is a fool’s errand.

This is, first and foremost, a project for me to have fun with and keep me out of trouble, so I'm certainly going to build at least one because this is how I do my hobby. It is also going to meet my needs in my listening room and equipment.

I decided what I wanted was:

• High dynamic range
• Low distortion
• Wide dispersion in both planes
• Customizable performance for a shelf or floor standing situation

I looked at commercial and commercial kits and while I could find a lot of expensive speakers have this most of these features, AFAIK, none of the high output centers I looked at were built for shelf mounting, and this created the limiting factor which I decided to take on as a design challenge: It had to be relatively compact.

Relatively meaning compared to some of the monster sized center channels I’ve seen from Wilson, ATC or Legacy. I’m sure they are fine performers, but I wanted the same output levels in a smaller cabinet.

The design is a 3-way with 2x 7" woofers about 13" deep, and the equivalent of a thousand watts of nCore power on tap. :)

The first cabinet should arrive in a month or so. I’ll post more in my blog when I have actual pictures.