I fell into groupthink when I purchased my first set of HT speakers from Axiom and just assumed a horizontal center was appropriate. For months I never noticed anything wrong until one day by accident I did. Since then like casey01, and a few others, I’ve discovered no horizontal center that I like. I don’t think it would be so noticeable to me if the M80 and M22 didn’t sound so damn transparent.
I also think it has something to do with people perceptions. I can walk under the nose or climb up in the cockpit of one of our aircraft and know the weather radar is still on by the high pitched warble it makes or that the inertial guidance gyros are still spinning because of their high pitched wine. No one else hears these over the other equipment even when I point them out. I use to always walk point because I could notice things that no one else did.
Before you think this is neat it has a big down side in that I can’t spend much time in busy public places w/o getting a headache and what I call “brain cloud” where it feels like there’s a fog surrounding all my senses. Only way to prevent this is to spike my adrenalin which brings everything into hyper sharp focus at the expense of being exhausting to maintain.
A couple of other ways I’ve found to mitigate this is by running at moderate to high intensity inducing a “runners high.” There’s a certain plant that also accomplishes this w/o all the sweating.
I also found that certain anti-histamines tune my senses down. I couldn’t make it through a date in high school w/o taking half a Contact before the date.
I can’t speak for others but in my case I’m clearly abnormal and as most people across all speaker brands have no problems with their center speakers I hope that any casual readers of my posts don’t take my impressions out of context.
