Centre Speaker Guide: Choosing the Best Center Channel Speaker for You
The Receiver is undoubtedly the most important single component of any home theatre system; many would argue that the centre speaker comes right behind it in second place. Despite this fact there are relatively few information sources that specifically address this component and provide an informative set of guidelines to help you figure out which type you need. I’ve written this article to help out anyone who’s looking for the best centre speaker for their needs.
First of let’s address the obvious question, what does a center channel speaker actually do? This component is actually responsible for delivering all of the dialogue from the film to your ears. Unlike other sounds the vocals actually come at you straight from the TV rather than from the sides to ensure clarity and accuracy. Industry experts agree that the best way to actually purchase a home theatre system is to find a receiver and speaker set which actually work well together and complement one another.
The amount of work someone is required to properly set up an audio system varies between the models. Recently many manufacturers are offering all in one home theatre systems which feature all of the components in one box already configured for you. This takes some of the complexity out of finding different components that complement each other and trying to fit them all together. In fact the only thing you really need to do with these all in one home theatre systems is to position the speakers for optimum acoustics. Once you’ve calibrated the system there’s not much you can actually do to improve the system, in all most all cases purchasing a higher quality receiver (in an attempt to boost the system) isn’t an option because it wouldn’t be compatible.
This is where the importance of the centre speaker really becomes apparent, because this component isn’t always top of the range in these made home theatre sets replacing it with one that is will shoot the performance of your audio system through the roof. The simply matter of upgrading the central channel speaker will actually double its performance. Of course doing so would be hugely expensive and it would be much cheaper to simply buy a better performing component system.
Ideally you want to be spending £150-£350 ($250-$500) on a central speaker, it is by far and away the most expensive type of speaker in a system but that’s because to drastically improve the audio quality of anything you’re watching. In terms of power ratings, you need to make sure the centre channel speaker you purchases matches up with that of the receiver. A receiver with 1, 000 watts (RMS) should be connected to a central speaker between 200 and 400 watts (RMS). I find that a 400 watt center speaker will run perfectly on a 1000 watt receiver.
When selecting a centre channel speaker you need to ensure that other sounds and background noise isn’t leaking in to it from the other speakers. The central speaker is designed for dialogue and actor’s voices, if your speaker cannot properly differentiate between the two you will find that conversations and background noises become merged into one and aren’t as clear as they could be. This often results in the annoying practice of actually having to adjust the volume between action and dialogue scenes because the volume levels for one aren’t suitable for the other.
This ‘audio leaking’ becomes less apparent the more money you’re prepared to spend on the centre speaker, a top of the range model will eradicate this phenomenon completely, leaving you with crisp and clear dialogue. At this point your surround sound speakers can focus on delivering the background sound information as they were originally intended to do. Home theatre speakers are actually designed to perform different functions and deliver different types of audio, cheaper systems aren’t able to properly differentiate the different sound sources and assign them to the various different speakers, resulting in much poorer audio quality.
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