Center channel - Page 2

heh,funny man.In some instances a center channel is great even for use with a stereo system.Nothing beats wiiiiiide stereo with a timbre matched center fill for realism

With surround,even though many claim it is unimportant,the center channel is essential unless you are so close to the speakers you don't have a lateral stereo spread anyway.
But only if properly set-up. Throw out the setup manuals and disregard the general opinion on center channel set setup.
Once you hear a system that has all the fronts on the same lateral plane ,all tweeters are at the same level in height with relation to the listeners ear and the level of the center dialog "screen lock" channel is set to approx +6dB when compared to the left and right main speakers there is no going back.
In this configuration it is the center speaker doing most of the work and which dominates the soundfield with the stereo pair only noticeable for "off camera" cues to let you know something is coming from that direction.Otherwise they are just loafing along unnoticed.

No single loudspeaker in the array should draw attention to itself until it receives a directional cue EXCEPT for the center speaker which is the focal point of the soundfield and the one which all others work off.
Even the subwoofer should be unobtrusive and not be noticed for even being there until called on to produce a low rumbling note.The shock when it kicks in and things begin to rattle off shelves in the room is far more effective when enjoying a movie than the typical "boom boom boom".

just my opinion folks but that is how the rickmeister likes surround,sneaky and shocking.i want to be startled.I want to look behind me to see what is coming,I want the dialog to actually be attached toa face and action taking place on the screen to be locked there and not wandering to the left and right speakers.

I have always preferred the speaker level inputs and i will explain why.
First,I am an audio "minimalist" which means i like the signal path to be as clean and uncluttered as possible and the have active circuitry only where needed so a good 75% of my sound system (loudspeaker and headphone systems) are passive with gain,buffer or power stages only where I must have them.The less I have in the signal path the less that can muck up the sound.

Straight in/straight out with gain.

but being a realist who likes what i like I also go against the normal convention and use "gadgets" to modify the sound to my liking including custom tone controls,filters,passive attenuation devices to pad down some signals,transformers for balancing and upping the gain on others,etc.
I am not an audio snob who would rather suffer bad music and blame it on the engineer when asimple fix can make the unlistenable a pleasing experience.
Ever hear a song on the radio or during a movie that you like but it sounds like crap on your playback system even though you have spent some pretty good amounts of loot on it ? It is because the radio and movie engineer tinkered with the sound of the song until it sounded good ! Something that while maybe a common sense thing to some is just against what the audio gods have decreed as not being proper hi-fidelity.They would have you spend $50,000 on equipmenrt to try and make this crappy sounding though great song sound listenable when a simple handfull of resistors and capacitors in a well thought out tone control could have saved you the time ,effort and money.But this is not fashionable so......

Anyway,back to the point :

It is my opinion from listening to music in every format from mono to dynaquad to quadraphonics to delay based ambience and all the way up to modern surround sound formats that a properly set up sub is essential for both movies and music.With movies it is along with the center channel the driving force behind the experience of being placed"IN" the movie rather than watching it from afar.Think about the word surround and then tell me how many times you have actually felt like you were "surrounded" by the spectacle.
Don't use the movie theater as a reference,they have no clue and beleive throwing volume at you is the way when what they need to really do is get away from the concept of absolute dynamic range and start thinking about downward expansion.that is where you bring up the low level signals so that they are not lost in the ambient field and huge space of a movie theater.Once this is accomplished they could lower the overall volume without losing the soft parts and prevent the headache i usually get at the movies

With surround sound the subwoofer requirement is a bit different than it is for music and it is a bit more intrusive so any disconnects will be heard in some instances.
these disconnects come from more than one area and are about the most difficult part of stereo or surround sound set-up : System Matching.
This is the real fun/nightmare part of having a fetish for audio gear.Get it right and you can die happy but the journey can take years off your life due to the frustration.And the audio hype out there does not make it easy .
"buy this subwoofer ! It is the best out there !Beats ALL the competition "

Oh yeah ? Do you know my room dimensions ? System response,system sensitivity,room furnishings ? Do you know what the lower limits of my main system are and if it has a steep drop after a certain frequency or a gradual bottom rolloff ?
do you know my listening habits and what my preferred volume level and music tast are ?
Of course not so as in most things a bit of research combined with trial and error are what is required.that or a recommendation from someone with a similiar situation.
so you choose your woofer which is matched it to your system,set it up according to all proper techniques and

IT SOUND LIKE CRAP !!!!!!!!

What to do ?
Think !
All you need to do is do some thinking on the subject and you can not help but come to the conclusion that unless ALL your amps and ALL your speakers are identical and made by the same company there will be sound differences between the various componants and no getting around it.Amp A (the main stereo amp) does NOT sound like amp B (the sub amp) so there is bound to be some kind of "disconnect" at and around the crossover frequency.Kinda like wearing one white and one black sock.
OK,maybe not that extreme
But if you use the speaker level inputs what you have done is to put the main stereo amp in series with the subwoofer amp which in the end means you have taken the harmonic nature of the system right through to the subwoofer.What the speaker input does is to take a speaker level signal from the main amp and covert it to a line level signal using a couple of resistors which is then passed on to the "line level" input which in turn goes to the crossover and finally the amp stage.
This retains some of the sound of the main amp and carries it through the crossover region of the sub amp which to my ears makes for better speaker/sub integration.again back to the "seamless" point.

So this was a long winded way of saying i would use the speaker inputs

"wandering to the left and right speakers."

No wandering with my speakers

umn...those are called headphones man

actually,even though you are not experiencing a "hole" in the middle of the image you are still defeating the purpose of the center image being louder than the left/right signals which are only meant as directional cues in surround.
If you are happy with your setup that ois cool but it is not the proper way to go if starting out and wanting to do it right the first time.

BTW,will bounce a pdf on three channel stereo this way soon from the Klipsch site.A real interesting read

center on rick

actually i decided to link to the page instead so credit can be given where it is due :

http://forums.klipsch.com/idealbb/vi...-989C99F1F794}

while this is not surround sound related it does make a good case for three channel stereo

rickn-the-middle-of-it-all

It has been said that the center channel is a newfangled thing conjured up to sell more speakers. I'll hunt an essay on that down when I get home. When I have a center image, say a solo guitar, no matter how loud I turn up the volume, I hear nothing coming from my speakers - just the center. I mean that literally - as long as I'm sitting in the center, I hear the sound coming unambiguously from the center.

Actually, here's the article! Gotta run, break in my orchestra rehearsal is over!!!!

http://ellisaudio.com/cc.htm

It was a new fangled idea-in the '50s !

Just don't sit with a group or move your head man or that dead center image will fall apart.Which if it works for you cool but the rerst of us must muddle along and deal with "living" systems where people come and go, and family/freinds watch movies together.No single dead locked sweat spot will cut it and the goal must be to provide the best comprimise from all seating positions.

I like to sit behind the board at concerts but when this is not possible i still enjoy the performance because of the angled speaker arrays.

BTW/OT-my main b*tch with all headphone surround technologies is the disconnect between the action on the screen and anfd the sound if i look to the side even for a moment.Very disconcerting to have the sound image follow your head movement but not the visual image.Since this is something i have been researching for years and have tinkered with every type of multichannel audio there is I have been reading some of the N.A.S.A. papers on binaural with interest.Especially the sound/visual cue/head movement tracking part.Not something the average person could afford even if it was available to the consumer but still it is way cool to know it is not only possible but is being used in training videos.
Me.i'll take mine passive for now thank you

Yeah, I know, if you move around while seriously watching a movie or listening to music, you're going to have a bigger problem with 2 speaker stereo. But my contention was that for a single person, and you ain't gonna be movin' around when listenin' seriously........you get my drift? Btw, my speakers are about 4 feet apart and I can move my head about a foot at the outside without being upset by the image shift. It gets better the farther I spread my speakers apart. As it is, I already have trouble locating the center between my speakers since the sound just floats in front of me so I need to get a measuring tape out and figure it out...

Well, moot point anyway, clearly a center channel would likely be beneficial in sultan's case

Man, Klipsch had bad imaging and started promoting center channels since the '50s??!?!

Three-channel audio is older than the '50s. The early Bell Labs research (mid 1930s) found that having at least three channels was best for music reproduction. However, in the early years there was no practical way to get more than two channels out of the grooves of a vinyl record, so we were stuck with stereo.

A lot of the '50s and '60s audio companies were pushing stereo channels, not just Klipsch. Avery Fisher was a vocal proponent of center channels.

These days, since we're stuck mostly with Redbook recordings, I tend to agree with ooheadsoo, that stereo speakers with very good dispersion are the way to go for music.

The argument that center channels are good for large groups in home theatre applications makes sense to a degree, but due to room effects you can almost never get the bass right throughout a room, so getting the mids and highs right seems only like winning half the battle.

sure you can.It is called high pass filtering and if you set it to 70-200 hz you take the bass entirely out of the equation.and this is how it needs to be for multichannel sound anyways since the high pass is already built into the system.
I personally chose an all passive path because i can't stand adding electronics to the signal path I do not want or need so these "low cut" filters are simply an inline capacitor.

But beleive me when i tell you.Take theory and what things should be and toss them out the window.Disregard 85% of the crap in the operating manuals and don't listen to the experts who mostly just repeat the same line.

A properly set up surround sound system with a center channel for TV screen "lock" having precedance and with the rest of the speakers being diffuse and not identified as individual sound sources until called on to do so by direction cues will blow you away when compared to the alternative with a good movie/effects sound track.You can still enjoy the "centerlkess" method but if starting out specifically to do surround why would you cut corners right out of the gate ?

the question was on a center channel and its importance for surround sound,not "I have great stereo from two feet away so why do i need a center"

as for three channel stereo : this depends entirely on speaker dispersion,speaker spacing,toe in,image ,room size........

no absolutes in audio and every situation is different so you build/set up to suit your personal requirements and if the end result is pleasing to you,the person using the equipment,then you have won the battle no matter how you waged the war

bottom line.I have eight speakers available even though i mostly just listen to the main stereo pair for most musicbut i am considering adding a couple of horn loaded bass bins just to add some more punch in the 45-100 hz range for movies and parties where the extra slam will be appreciated.

Being a "use specific" add on i am not worried about total accuracy here but plain old system enjoyment and fun factor for those times i just want to let 'er rip.

Other times it is left/right/sub @ 60 hz that i use if the recording is one that has actual bass down there-most do not.
With live recordings i throw on the surround channels (three down each side plus one behind) which opens up the space of my room and emulates the original venue,adding the ambience that was actually caught on the recording as an out of phase signal and reproduced with a simple L-R circuit (hafler dynaquad matrix)

and finally when viewing DVDa the center speaker goes on and dominates the sound until there are those directional cues that make surround what it is

Speakers 1/2-main stereo pair at 40-25 khz (added a padded down super tweeter to my Heresys that kicks in at 16khz and takes the system up to 30khz or so)

Speaker 3-custom voice matched Heresy Drivers in my box center ,bandwidth limited to 75-17khz

Speakers 4/5/6/7/8-got my hands on some Jensen duettes from 1956 plus I made some boxes for high up on the wall/ceiling junction using vintage Jensen drivers to match the duettes.This entire 5 speaker set up is limited in bandwidth to from 100-15khz plus i have a switch to bang it down to the original dolby prologi spec of 7khz at the top end

I can use them in any combination depending on the requirement and source but at the flip of a switch go back to two channel stereo.

I like practical and enjoyable over fashion and treends so i try not to limit myself.Works for me but as usual

YMMV

some may find this a bit interesting.won't change any minds but still a good read

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/surround_...nter%20speaker