Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Centre channel, Axiom and Jim Smith

The major points inside the book are all about how to go about properly voicing a set of speakers and what to do to acoustically correct a room.

But to put it into a photographers lingo. If you shoot RAW, you can correct many problems in Post Production. But then again, is it not far better off to shoot the photograph correctly (right exposure, light, aperture, shutter speed) when your took the photograph in the first place.

Yes, with room correction technology you can change the sound your speakers emit to compensate for the way that your room effect the sound. or the other option is to correct the room so that it minimizes the negative effects on the sound. But the speakers are what they are. A badly designed speaker will never sound as good as a well designed speaker. I can't ever hope to get my old Celestian DL6 speakers to sound as good as my new M80s. They are simply designed differently and so they product a different sound.

The idea in the book focuses on how to make your system sound like what a sound engineer heard when the mix was made and recorded to your medium of choice. Ideally you would have the same setup as (s)he did during the mix and you will experience the same sound. We all know this is not possible.

So the question goes, does a movie theatre have directional front left and right speakers? Do they have just a single speaker, or a bank of speakers? Does their center channel have it's off axis sound rotate 90 degrees to match the on axis sound coming from the left and right channel? If they don't then how can you expect your HT to sound like the local movie complex down the street?

I guess the most important side to it is asking, how much impact does it really make? Are we talking about a large night and day difference or the proverbial how many angles fit though the eye of a needle. I don't know the answer to that.

In trying to achieve the perfect sound, am I running into that point of diminishing return where yes you can upgrade your sound by 5% but you must invest 100% more money to do so. But I can get you 7% better sound for a 1000% cost to do so.