Best center speakers for dialogue clarity?

Handsdown the Magnepan centers are incredible for dialogs and convey accurate minute details. Its one of those purchases that make your head shake in disbelief at the level of detail reproduction, you can even sense the size of the room when mike properly. The older center requires good set-up w/sub as compare to the recent CC3.

The CC3 still requires a sub but I agree with you about its value as a center channel for clarity.

I actually am very disappointed with My Maggie CC2 center...the tendency of Maggie's to lose all low-level detail below a certain volume forces me to run the center almost 10db hotter than my mains to make soft-spoken dialogue intelligible, while keeping explosions and other loud sound effects from blowing out my ears. As a result, dialog pans sound awful.

Maggies are great for stereo sound, but I would NOT, under any circumstances, recommend their center (at least the CC2)

Once I installed a rather small audio system to compliment a rather large front projection system. The speakers were Linn Kans all around with a Velodyne 18" ULD sub with a run of the mill Pioneer receiver and LD player. That system, amazingly enough, had the most life like home theater sound I've heard to date. Not as dynamic much more clarity than DTS/SDDS in some damn good theaters here in LA.