Flatscreen between speakers

@knownothing 

Blu-ray soundtracks sounded great pretty much from day one

I don't know what your set-up is, but do you have a centre-channel speaker?  If so, what do you do with it when playing two channel stereo?

If a flat panel TV interferes with your sound quality, surely a purpose-built resonator like a dynamic speaker would be worse?

@richardbrand do have a center channel and rear channels as well.  It has occurred to me that 7 unused drivers in the those three speakers were affecting the sound quality during stereo playback.  I have also covered those speakers to see if I can tell a difference in the sound quality.  I cannot.  For my system set up in my room, the TV screen is a much bigger factor.

kn

@samoh 

I discovered that the phantom center image that my speakers create 

I am getting confused here about the word phantom!  

I am happy to call the synthetic cente channel created by some processors from 2-channel sources "phantom" because it does not exist in the real source.

On the other hand, many multi-channel recordings do have a genuine centre channel.  For those like me who choose not to have a centre speaker, it can be added to front left and front right.  Our brain / ear system seems to have no problem recreating it - it is just part of what we call imaging.  To my mind, it is not "phantom"

Phantom center is a long used term that basically describes imaging between the speakers from standard 2 channel stereo. Derived center is a common term for a synthetic channel that is electronically extracted from the left and right channels of a 2 channel stereo recording to make a center channel.

It's interesting to think that before the age of electronics it would have been pretty much impossible to pull of the phantom center image trick because there were no multiple, near identical, time aligned sound sources available. 

@asctim 

So phantom centre describes imaging where the subject is dead centre!  Are there terms for where all the other sound sources might be located?

In the old days of classical stereo, recordings were made using a very small number of microphones (two or three being common) and the imaging "trick" was pulled off to great effect - no need for "multiple, near identical, time aligned sound sources" to be electronically processed