Quote Originally Posted by 02audionoob
Reading this thread prompts me to wonder...is this type of center design only for aesthetics?

This design is problematic, but less so than most center speakers. What makes this speaker light years ahead of the typical center is the symmetrical vertical placement of the tweeter and midrange. The wide placement of the woofers virtually assures lobing off axis, and that is the problem with horizontally mounted center speakers.

This design is mainly to satisfy the WAF. It seems that the THX mandated similar speaker layout created problems aesthetically when placed vertically over or under a television set. So in response, manufacturers start making lower profile center speakers which could fit atop a television without poking up in the air like a 10 story building. The trade off was a non-uniform off axis response(which causes dialog intelligibility issues for viewers seated off axis). To make this issue less troublesome, some manufacturers added a midrange drivers under the tweeter so the woofers could be crossed over before lobing happens. Lobing still occurs, just not over as wide a frequency as the single tweeter design.

Two woofers are in center channels to make them more power compatible with tower speakers, or speakers that deploy more than one bass driver in their cabinets.



In other words, is this a compromised design that would this actually be outperformed by an exact match of the front speakers, which look like this?

I would say it is a better match frequency and dispersion wise, but would probably suffer power wise to dual mid/woofer designs.

There is no problem with having two bass/mid drivers in a center speaker, as long as the drivers are lined up in a vertical fashion, not a horizontal setup. THX had this one right.