Need for high quality powered center

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.

I've posted more details including a 3D rendering on my blog:

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-snr-c-concept.html

No thank you.

Why the need for active speaker in the center? I power my center from the HT reciever like most people and am pretty happy.

@carlsbad2 - Sir, this is an audiophile forum and good enough is not actually good enough! 😁

Now to answer why active instead of passive, if you have followed me at all you know I don’t push one over the other necessarily.

There were a number of features I realized I could combine into making a really superior center if I went with an active, DSP based solution. By choosing the driver sizes, crossover points, and delay to make a coherent whole I’ve achieved a "virtual point-source" center channel that behaves 95% like a true point source, with none of the drawbacks inherent AND gain control over the EQ of the center channel which my current receiver wont’ let me.

I not only want to try this as my center but if it works as I hope I may end up replacing all of my front speakers with the same "center" channel.

Not to mention, well, tons of low distortion, high output capabilities.