Quote Originally Posted by kexodusc
There's more to it than that. Certain speaker alignments exhibit different horizontal and vertical dispersion characterstics. When you tilt a speaker sideways, you take a speaker with a horizontal dispersion strength to a horizontal dispersion deficiency in many cases.
I am certainly not dismissing your description as I'm open to help in solving my own problem with a centre channel, however I can't quite get my head around these dispersion characteristics you mention.

Your argument holds true possibly for reasons NOT to use a Centre speaker as a L or R speaker, but I don't see it the other way around.

When home Centre speakers first came on the market they were designed as a magnetically shielded means of making voices appear close to the visually moving lips - 'voices' coming from a TV screen. They were cheaply made but attempted to create a 'balance' across the screen - hence a common formation of Tweeter in the middle with Woofers on either side. Since then they have become a little more sophisticated with more information being directed from the processor to the centre channel.

Then it seems, along came a different breed of centre speaker, some doing away totally with L&R speakers. These contained directional drivers across the horizontal axis and were aimed at more than one seating position/listener. Perhaps in these cases L&R speakers were designed in harmony with these new centre speakers but I don't think this is the case with Cdn Guy's situation.

The horizontal of music speakers is dictated first and foremost by the position of the tweeter. If all are in line then the next point is the woofer....as pointed out by Pixelthis the lower frequencies are less directional, more dispersed, so the height off the ground is not so important, (within reason).

Some people experience great SACD with no centre channel.
Some people find better music with their speakers facing the wall and listening to the rebound.

In my own case my problem is slightly different than Cdm Guy's in that I will have a wide projector screen to fill with sound so I will be wiring 2 extra L&R speakers as one centre speaker. I am perfectly happy to have these two speakers tilted over in the horizontal position as long as I use my starting point based on tweeter line up and all speakers on the same plane. After that I can play about with positions.

In Cdm Guy's case, he seems more than happy with his outcome. If it works for him he shouldn't be ridiculed for not adhering to the Manufacturers advice. After all the Manufacturer has a vested interest in selling dedicated centre speakers.



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