On Center
Jun 19 '01
The Bottom Line Choose your center channel speaker very carefully. Buy the best one you can afford. Your ears will thank you.
If you are setting up a home theater system, choosing the center channel speaker is one of your most important decisions. This won't be a highly technical review. Quite frankly, if you already know a lot of the technical aspects of choosing a speaker, my advice would most likely be worthless to you. On the other hand, some of the technical aspects of speaker systems goes beyond the scope of my knowledge. I wouldn't want to risk giving out inaccurate information.
Also, a lot of techno mumbo jumbo only serves to confuse most newbies unless you go into painstaking detail and explain each term. In the interest of making this review readable by the newbie and the audiophile alike, I'll try to keep it as simple as possible.
The most basic decision that you'll have to make when choosing a home theater speaker system is whether to purchase one of those complete speaker systems in a box, or to purchase each speaker individually. Each method has it's advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, if you choose to buy each speaker separately, it takes quite a bit more time. You must select carefully.
On the other hand, the complete speaker systems that typically sell for a couple of hundred dollars are usually a complete waste of your money. You could probably go out and purchase individual speakers indiscriminately and still end up with a vastly better system for maybe three or four hundred more. That sounds like a lot but good quality audio components aren't cheap. Often the cheapest speakers you can find deliver horrible quality performance.
It is possible to find relatively inexpensive speakers that perform almost, if not as well as speakers costing hundreds of dollars more. The key is to observe the speakers in action. Outrageously expensive speakers (Such as Bose) are not always the best performers. In many cases, you're paying for a prestigious name that has been pumped up by a lot of advertising hype. When I was shopping for a center channel speaker, the Bose center channel speaker (Which sells for nearly $200) had performance that was far inferior to most speakers selling for about $50 less. Not only that, but the Bose center channel speaker that I was looking at only contained four two and one half inch full range drivers. Nope, you don't even get a single tweeter for $200 from Bose.
After careful consideration and comparison, the two center channel speakers that I had narrowed my choice down to were the Yamaha NS-AC40X($149.95)and the JBL S-Center ($249.95). The Yamaha speaker consists of two five and a quarter inch aluminum woofers and a single one inch aluminum dome tweeter. The JBL consists of twin "PolyPlas" woofers, a four inch "PolyPlas" midrange driver and a one inch titanium tweeter. With the JBL being a three way speaker, it was my natural first choice. However, my budget at the time simply didn't allow for the $249.95 retail price. The speaker I went home with was the Yamaha NS-AC40X.
The speaker is surprisingly bulky and heavy. It certainly isn't a low profile speaker. It's performance is very good however. Still, I would have preferred to have had a three way speaker for the all-important center channel. There aren't many three way center speakers on the market though. The JBL is one of the only ones that I have personally seen selling for a reasonable price. I find it quite surprising that so many manufacturers would choose not to include a midrange driver on a speaker dedicated nearly exclusively to dialog.
The Yamaha does have a rear-mounted potentiometer to fine tune the cutoff of the tweeter to match the timbre of the speakers in the rest of your setup. All parts of the speaker seem to be of very high quality. The construction is very solid. Most importantly of all, for someone on a limited budget, the price is very reasonable.
I'll leave you with a few bits of advice for choosing a center channel speaker. This speaker is crucial for movie viewing. It contains almost all of the dialog of the movie soundtrack and a lot of the action. A speaker consisting of only full range paper cone drivers simply won't cut it. You'll be straining to hear what the actors are saying. If you feel that you can only afford to splurge on one speaker in your setup, this is the one you will want to splurge on. If you feel that you also must have a respectable subwoofer, buy the best center channel that you can afford and put the sub on the back burner for a while until you can save up enough for it. In the meantime, you may miss the deep bass portion of the soundtrack but better the bass than the most important element of the movie.
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Epinions.com ID:
Ahab1973
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Member: Brian
Location: USA
Reviews written: 131
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