>OK, tried the "phantom" center yesterday, and I hate to say this, but it didn't sound good at all. Very hollow sounding, I tried some other setting changes, but just turning the center on again was a huge improvment.
You probably have main speaker / room interface problems, most likely stemming from speaker placement relative to the walls (four feet off the front wall and a few feet to side walls is a nice place to start) and large objects (like a one-piece television; upgrading to front projection is in the top 3 things I've ever done for better audio performance).
A receiver with Audyssey equalization may be a reasonable work around for the problem.
You might get a bass boost at low frequencies with a phantom center (power response sums 6dB over a single speaker's output versus 3db at higher frequencies) although otherwise there shouldn't be a difference for listeners seated dead center between a phantom image and center channel.
