I'm in nearly same boat as heit911man (Onkyo NR809 with two P362s). Receiver and speakers should be arriving tomorrow afternoon - so pumped.
I've also started to research center channel and sub options. My space is small - 12x12x10, and I will be using the system for about 60% music 40% movies/tv. How much will I be missing out on from an audio quality standpoint without the center channel?
From reading the forums on this website, I realize that I will be missing quite a bit without a quality sub, especially on the movie side. Considering the size of my room, will the woofers in the 362s be sufficient?
Any help would be appreciated!
Some people are more sensitive to not having a center channel than others. Music wise you won't miss it if you're listening in direct or stereo mode obviously, but if you listen in 5-channel stereo or any surround/multi-channel mode, well, that might be a bit of a problem. Personally, I like having a center channel - it keeps the dialogue locked on the screen.
For the sub, it depends slightly on what type of movie - if you watch a lot of movies with no content below ~100 Hz i.e. no action movies (though, I'm sure there's other with low frequency content), then you can probably get by w/o a subwoofer, at least for a while. If you look at the
frequency response on the P360's, you can see they start tailing off at 100 Hz. As a
very general rule, most competently designed subwoofers should do frequencies below 80-100 Hz better than most speakers, since that's what they were designed to do.
For you, there's good news and bad news. The good news is, since your room is so small, you should have pretty good room gain and shouldn't need a monster sub to get worthwhile results. The bad news is, your room is square, and almost a cube in dimensions, which is not good for acoustics.
If I were you, I would look into getting subs - more than one. You could get by with one, but multiples are almost always preferred to smooth frequency response, which will be extra important for your particular room.
