So, over the last month or so I have made many many changes to my home theater based on all that I am learning, and happily I'm learning more every day. One of my latest points of interest came from a new purchase. I recently upgraded my speakers from a
Klipsch Reference Premiere bundle to a mostly Revel setup and the difference was quite dramatic. As part of that upgrade I wanted to improve the center channel but I do have a severe limitation as I have an entertainment center that long term I will get rid of but for now must remain and the spot for a center is 22x11x8 inches so I self limited my speaker search and there really was only one speaker that fit:
Ascend Acoustics Duo V2 LCR. I purchased, installed, and then watched several movies with said speaker in place.
What I found was that movies with lots of singing sounded a bit flat to me especially when compared to how good music sounds the my new Revel Performa F226Be towers. I'm not so sure what word to use but flat to me means no real sound stage effect. Anyways, as a result I began to search for solutions and immediately stumbled upon the idea of using a phantom center. Now I should preface my comment by saying that I have zero concern about anyone watching a movie not at the MLP as 99% of my movie watching is just me. In any case here's my point of this thread or my question as to whether or not a discussion of this topic is already underway which my guess is yes - I just couldn't find it . . . sorry
Point is: I turned off my center channel speaker and ran Auto Calibration on my Sony STR AZ7000ES in 4.1 mode and personally I find the difference to be night and day with the phantom center superbly placed and the overall sound vastly improved - at least at the MLP.
What have others experienced that have tried this? Are there center channel speakers that are equal to premium L&R channel speakers or is the only real answer to buy a high quality bookshelf speaker?