Hello, first post here. Recently discovered this awesome site and been learning a lot.
I see many here have the same headache I do: to add or not to add a center channel for increased clarity in movies.
And if deciding to add a center channel, going the AVR route vs. AVP and external amp, or something even more complicated.
After reading Floyd Toole's book on Sound Reproduction (well more like skimming) years ago, I decided a center channel was a good idea and I went the AVR route (Denon), but skimped on the center speaker. (Ascend CBM-170 which amirm has reviewed; not as good as my L-R pair, Ascend Sierra-1's)
Thing is, with much of my learnings from ASR I've been motivated to do some comparison testing with "troublesome scenes" in particular movies, with / without center, or with stereo downmix but only one speaker on to avoid interference, toggling between CBM-170 vs Sierra-1 used for center... And to be honest, the troublesome scenes did not become significantly less or more clear with any alternative.
Been looking at center speaker reviews on ASR, and now I'm wondering if something like one of the Revels reviewed by Amir would make a difference.
Ok, that was setup for the question: are there specific speaker measurements that can give an indication of clarity of vocals?
Is a flat response in the speech frequencies a good proxy? Any other measurements or design parameters to look for?
Do people with a great center channel setup still get movies with muddled dialogs?
I see many here have the same headache I do: to add or not to add a center channel for increased clarity in movies.
And if deciding to add a center channel, going the AVR route vs. AVP and external amp, or something even more complicated.
After reading Floyd Toole's book on Sound Reproduction (well more like skimming) years ago, I decided a center channel was a good idea and I went the AVR route (Denon), but skimped on the center speaker. (Ascend CBM-170 which amirm has reviewed; not as good as my L-R pair, Ascend Sierra-1's)
Thing is, with much of my learnings from ASR I've been motivated to do some comparison testing with "troublesome scenes" in particular movies, with / without center, or with stereo downmix but only one speaker on to avoid interference, toggling between CBM-170 vs Sierra-1 used for center... And to be honest, the troublesome scenes did not become significantly less or more clear with any alternative.
Been looking at center speaker reviews on ASR, and now I'm wondering if something like one of the Revels reviewed by Amir would make a difference.
Ok, that was setup for the question: are there specific speaker measurements that can give an indication of clarity of vocals?
Is a flat response in the speech frequencies a good proxy? Any other measurements or design parameters to look for?
Do people with a great center channel setup still get movies with muddled dialogs?
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