Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Quick center channel question?

I have a VP150 that I use with our 46" TV. In our old house, I had the VP150 mounted above the TV, pointed down at the listener's ears. The family room in the new house has a better throw, so the sofa is sitting a bit further back. We're going to wall mount the TV now, and I was thinking that it'd be better to have the VP150 below the TV, rather than above it. My wife has had issues in the past hearing the dialog from the center channel, and I think that have the speaker sitting closer to ear level with the TV above it might remedy this issue.

Thoughts on center channel placement?!

Thanks!

Boosting the signal of the VP150 in the receiver settings helps. I find I need to do this with certain televisions programs where the centre channels volume is mixed low. I find it varies from program to program and station to station.

I really need to figure out how to program that boost into my Harmony.

AB, just on general principles, if you can mount the center closer to ear level, do so. However, if you have it pointed at your ears in both the high and lower positions it shouldn't make a significant difference in dialog intelligibility. As Doc pointed out, boosting the level of the center a few dB on those source materials which are causing difficulty is probably more meaningful.

I found that moving my center forward away from the screen some helped improve how it sounded. Got the idea from this article:

Center Channel Intelligibility

That is interesting. I hadn't read that before, but my center channel is about a foot and a half out in front and hanging above the TV aimed down towards my head. And I don't have any trouble what-so-ever with dialog intelligibility. In fact, as I pointed out in another post, I actually turn the center down to zero db's and run the mains at around +3.

Works for me.

Excellent. Thanks for the advice. I'm not really sure why it never occurred to me to bump the volume on it. It was calibrated with a decibel meter, but I found I had to turn the sub down a bit because it was a bit hot for our tastes. As soon as the mount shows up, I'll get it all set up and see what works best. (We don't want to mount the TV too high on the wall, so that's another consideration.)

DB meters are not completely accurate for subs. Use them cause it looks cool for a rough base then tweak until your happy.