Running Horizontal Center Channels As L&R...

[CaptainRufus]

Hello all! Here's an oddball one for you.

I have a pair of "bookshelves" flanking my fireplace, angled in the corners of the room at approx 30deg. Upon looking for a suitable speaker, I came up with the idea of a pair of 3-way center speakers like the SVS Ultra or similar. I do understand there may be some comb filtering issues but most of the seating is along the walls coming out away from the fireplace and I plan to run the setup summed to mono anyway. I don't care about stereo imaging or anything like that as the majority of listening will be done off axis. The speakers will be roughly 10ft apart, 3ft from the back wall, 1-2ft from the side wall, toed in that approx 30deg, and most likely 2ft above ear level.

The center channel idea is mostly aesthetic, the shelves are 32" wide and I would like to fill that space as much as possible. I do not want to use a classic style 3-way with a 10"+ woofer either as there may also be a turntable on one of those shelves.

Strange request? Yes... Thoughts? Welcomed... Thank you!

 

[shadyJ]

3-way centers like that SVS Ultra center do not have nearly as severe problem with comb filtering as 2-way center speakers. It's the MTMs that you have to be wary of. The SVS speakers pushes down the crossover to the bass driver so low that lateral lobing from the bass drivers aren't even a big deal since the room acoustics will screw up a lot of that low frequency response anyway. 3-way centers that align the midrange vertically with the tweeters is an intelligent center design. Another good way to build a center is to raise the tweeter and push the midrange or bass drivers so close that they act as a single woofer in their frequency band, like so:

You could also use a single coaxial driver design like Hsu's CCB-8, KEF LS50, or the JTR Single 8HT, none of which obviously could not have a lobing problem.