Tomtuttle,
You are correct re Axiom's "first family". With really large screens and one center way above or below, the dialog may seem separated from the screen, which is why Ian installed two VP150s, running two centers in parallel. Big improvement in his particular room because the phantom center signal images virtually in the center of the screen.
I tried a number of listening tests using dual centers and it worked fine.
Incidentally, there's more to say about interchannel crosstalk. It does lessen stereo separation somewhat. Years ago, both Bob Carver ("Sonic Holography) and Matthew Polk worked variations on circuits that eliminated interchannel crosstalk; in Carver's implementation, it was installed in his preamps. Polk had a number of speaker models (I forget what fancy name he come up with) that had similar ciruits in the speakers.
The problem in both cases was that you had to sit more or less exactly on axis for the circuits to work properly. If you did, you sometimes got spectacular increases in stereo separation.
Unfortunately however, there was an annoying "phasiness" to the sound that you could hear all the time, because your ear/brain was simultaneously receiving and processing in-phase, out of phase, and special crosstalk-cancelling signals. I think it was too much for our auditory system system to sort out. The only way to avoid interchannel crosstalk is to listen on headphones. That way, each ear receives only the signals that are intended for it.
Regards,
