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You don't need a center. A center will help you to adjust levels for dialogs differently and help with general horizontal dispertion, but 4.1 is OK.

Ok, so when you don't connect a center channel then the reciever automatically splits the center channel and sends it to the left and right mains? I wasn't sure if it would do that or not. I installed a 5.1 channel head unit into my car. And before I added a center speaker, movies I'd play on there had no dialog except for a very, very faint echo in the left and right front speakers. When I hooked up the center speaker, I had dialog.

It is not the speakers you connect, but how you configure the receiver. If you tell the receiver you don't have a center, it will act accordingly. You car unit was configured for 5.1 so that is why it wasn't working.

The M22's could be used as a center as well. I don't recall anyone using M22's, but I know many use M2's to great effect.

Tech, $899 is an an excellent buy on the 876, which is a very full-featured(e.g., Audyssey MultEQ XT with Dynamic EQ, Reon video processor, etc.)receiver with plenty of power, including at 4 ohms. It should work very well with your M80s, which are a bit higher than average in sensitivity and require less power than many other speakers.

As to having a separate center speaker, if you're presently satisfied with the phantom center that you're using, then it certainly isn't necessary, but if you can temporarily use some speaker as a center as an experiment you can possibly judge if you like it even better that way. The usual downside of the phantom center is that the image of dialog or other material in the center channel will move to the side of a listener not in the center(but not farther out than the main on that side). Another point is that a separate center speaker can have it's volume level bumped up a bit to help the intelligibility of dialog in certain movies.