I got a Denon AVR-800 receiver. Am I cool yet? I frankensteined togetherthese 5 speakers. The two white ones are the best as I can hear. How should I assort my ragtag team of underdogs to win the acoustic championship? I’ve had it with just the two white ones and only doing two speakers. Then with the two white and two black and doing the STUDIO setting on my receiver. I don’t really have enough wire to string it behind me for real surround sound and mom would get mad with those wires running all around the living room anyway. I’ve tried using 3 with a center speaker but I have two good (well they’re the two best I have) speakers and 3 ok speakers so I never got it to sound right with center, or couldn’t figure out how loud center should be. I figure’d more speakers would be better, but maybe it’d just be better to have 2 speakers of better quality without the other ones interfering.
ideas? suggestions? advice?
Correct - when you’re dealing with low quality stuff, it’s better to focus on the better sounding components than let additional shitty speakers ruin things for you. Don’t mess with a center speaker until you get an actual center speaker.
Stick with the two good speakers. That one silver speaker looks like it used to be part of a boom box, and I’m guessing it sounds lousy. The center speaker will be reproducing most dialog in movies, so you really need a good speaker here, or voices will be muddled.
If you really want surround, look into getting a “sound bar.” These things sit front and center, and through a combination of acoustics and elfin magic, simulate surround without all the wires and speakers behind you.
As for how loud the center channel should be, your receiver should have a test mode that rotates pink noise trough all the channels, and you just set the levels so it all sounds equally loud at the listening position.
Not the one quoted in the OP.