1. Placement. Any speaker not designed to be placed on a TV or in an entertainment center will sound bad there - and most center channels aren't. Finally, a plastic TV cabinet is also very resonant.
2. The horizontal MTM orientation. There will be off-axis nulls of up to 20dB.
With many center channels, your best bet is to put it on an adjustable height stand (Sound Anchors) a few feet in front of the TV/screen, vertically, raised as high as you can without getting in the way of the picture. Or perhaps suspended a few feet from the ceiling - we can't localize height as well when sounds are coming from above us.
3. I used to think the center channel was only for movie dialog therefore making it less important (I figure that I don't know what actors & actresses sound like in the flesh - although I've heard plenty of musical instruments and know when they're off). One of the dipole list guys decided to do a survey - 14/15 movies he tried had music up there. I played with it in my system, found that this was mostly the case. After upgrading main speakers (Linkwitz Orion), the sound quality issues from an inferior center channel (Definitive C1) using a fabric dome tweeter (metal/fabric tweeter seems to make the biggest difference i ntweeter integration) are readily aparant; so I'll be building a shorter 3-way dipole center.
2. The horizontal MTM orientation. There will be off-axis nulls of up to 20dB.
With many center channels, your best bet is to put it on an adjustable height stand (Sound Anchors) a few feet in front of the TV/screen, vertically, raised as high as you can without getting in the way of the picture. Or perhaps suspended a few feet from the ceiling - we can't localize height as well when sounds are coming from above us.
3. I used to think the center channel was only for movie dialog therefore making it less important (I figure that I don't know what actors & actresses sound like in the flesh - although I've heard plenty of musical instruments and know when they're off). One of the dipole list guys decided to do a survey - 14/15 movies he tried had music up there. I played with it in my system, found that this was mostly the case. After upgrading main speakers (Linkwitz Orion), the sound quality issues from an inferior center channel (Definitive C1) using a fabric dome tweeter (metal/fabric tweeter seems to make the biggest difference i ntweeter integration) are readily aparant; so I'll be building a shorter 3-way dipole center.