Timber Matching Speakers

[highfigh]

I recommend it across the front 3. When I purchased my main L+R I could not afford the matching centre at the time and went with an older MTM model in the interim. It drove me crazy as it was very evident that the centre dialogue sounded different. Now that I have the matching WMTW centre the system is well balanced. For TV and movies the centre channel gets a lot of content, so unless you watch little TV and play mostly music, I recommend getting the best centre you can afford. I would go so far as to say that a 2-channel phantom centre is better than a mismatched centre. The exception to that might be a situation where you have a lot of family members sitting off to the side outside of the sweet spot, in which case you need that centre speaker to anchor the dialogue to the middle.

And this is exactly the reason the center channel speaker SHOULDN'T have horizontal symmetry- as soon as the listener moves off axis, phase cancellations occur and none of those can be EQ'd out of the sound.

My system is stereo because my room doesn't lend itself to installing surround speakers. The speakers I built reproduce human voices so well that one time, I was reading/working on my laptop while a local radio show interviewed someone I know and as he described a not-so-great situation involving someone whose first name is the same as mine, he said "Jim, what are you doing?". The situation seemed as if it could have happened where I worked and where he was a customer, so I reacted to it rather than passing it off. I actually said "What? I didn't do that!"- it was very unsettling because it sounded like he was in the room at the time. The guy being interviewed thought it was hilarious when I told him about it.

 

[dlaloum]

Room correction systems will absolutely not make dissimilar drivers sound the same,

Depends on whether the dissimilarity is primarily dispersion pattern & resonances (not easily resolved), or primarily voicing profile - fixable with EQ.