Thanks, Jakeman, for telling the story of the listening comparisons with Joe and the array of drivers in the center channel speakers.
Your quote below prompted an added thought:
"Hence even with the same drivers as the mains there will be a slight change in tonality and timbre."
What is interesting is that even using identical speakers--not just identical drivers-- for the front left, center, and right channels, if you use pink noise as the test signal, the three identical speakers may have audible differences in tonality and timbre because of interactions with room boundaries and reflections.
These are detectable with pink noise, but once you use vocalists or dialogue as signals, the differences become difficult to detect, unless of course there are gross location differences in the room, e.g. if the left speaker was in or very close to a corner, and the right speaker was not, with the center between them.
You can even experiment with this with left and right mains and pink noise in stereo only. Depending on variables in your room, they may not sound identical using pink noise. It's an illustration of just how influential the room is in affecting the timbral balance of each speaker.
Regards,
Regards,
