Do you ever use the balance on your pre amp?

I have the same problem. One side of my room is open and the speaker on that side loses the side wall for reverb etc. Anything I could do, acoustically, would have a VERY strong negativo WAF...

Although my ARC Ref 3 has a balance control, going to mono is the first thing I try to cure an unbalanced image. My room also is asymmetrical but the speakers are positioned so that the sound is balanced on good recordings. If it isn't, my first assumption is that it must have been the sound engineer's fault. After 20++ years of pursuing the 'absolute sound' in stereo on vinyl in classical, jazz and rock, I've come to suspect that a great many stereo recordings (more than half, perhaps?) in fact never had a stable, balanced image on the master, not to mention on the copies that were issued and reissued, regardless of format.

One advantage of having a center speaker is that center sounds (particularly vocals) are properly located without need for ultra-precise gain matching of 2 channel signals.

Some recordings I have basically require balance adjustment. Often times the gain levels aren't matched properly. It is amazing how lax some recording engineers can be. Oh well, at least I can fix it myself.

Arthur

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Aball...On those recordings, perhaps the sound image that you seek to center is not supposed to be centered. Good speakers will produce a "soundstage" with instruments located anywhere between the speakers, and sometimes beyond. But image location has more to do with time-of-arrival than SPL, so trying to move an image by gain control (balance) is not the greatest idea.

The balance control is very useful to obtain equal gains in your electronics, as opposed to what is on the recording. The method is to play a mono source and listen to a speaker or headset bridged across your stereo amp. Adjust the balance control for a null (silence). You will probably find that perfect silence cannot be achieved until frequency response of the two channels is also tweeked with an equalizer or tone controls. I did a lot of this stuff when I tinkered with various matrix multichannel schemes.
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