Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater phantom center channel

As long as your receiver can accept a "NONE" option for the center channel and route the center signal to the L + R mains you're not going to miss much. I ran that way for quite a while, then single M2 center for a while, finally settled on a VP100 mostly because of the shielding.

I did find that the dialog was a bit more clear with a center, even with M60s as mains, but the difference is pretty small.

As everyone has said, the other benefit of a center speaker is that you can sit a bit to the left and right of the sweet spot and still hear voices coming from the right place on the screen. Without a center speaker if you sit to the left the voices are going to sound like they're coming from the left edge of the screen.

Anyways, don't sweat it. 4.1 is gonna sound way better than 2.1, and you'll still have 5.1 to look forward to...