Tip #5: Center Channel Optimization
There is no question that the most important speaker in your home theater audio system is your center channel. If you cannot understand the dialog in a movie or TV show, you will just not have an enjoyable experience.
We have seen many situations where the way a center channel speaker is placed in a cabinet or the wall construction it is mounted in or on top of can cause resonances that color the sound coming out. These resonances hide the tiny little details in the sound of the emotions the performer is putting into the scene. For some of you, there may be no issue at all, but we find many systems where this simple tip can make a substantial difference.
We have an entire companion video on how to optimize your center channel that goes over everything in detail, but I will quickly tell you here some things to try.
What we want to do here is to experiment with the placement of your center channel and the frequency where your center channel speaker crosses over to your subwoofer. That frequency is where the deeper bass tones are routed to your subwoofer. Normally, the default crossover frequency is 80Hz, but we find in some cases, raising this slightly will produce better results for the center channel speaker.
First, go into your audio settings for your home theater receiver and make sure you can make fine adjustments. If your choice is just large or small, you will not be able to make any changes to the crossover and will need to just try moving the speaker if you can. Find a clip from a movie scene that has deeper male voices speaking. Listen carefully and if any of those voices get chesty sounding, you have a resonance problem. Even if you do not hear it when you test, you will probably notice an improvement in clarity if you try these tips.
For those of you with an in-room center channel speaker, you should try moving it further away from the wall behind it. This could mean moving it forward on the cabinet it is on top of or moving its stand away from the back wall and closer to you. If your speaker is sitting on a cabinet, be sure there are some rubber feet between the speaker and the cabinet.
Moving it might fix it, but if it did not, try changing your crossover from 80 Hz to 90 Hz and listen again. Keep doing this until you go up to 120 Hz. In some rare cases, lowering the crossover may sound better — you can try going down as low as 60 Hz. If you have a cabinet or wall resonance issue, things will usually clear up at around 90-100 Hz.
After these adjustments, you should hear that dialog in general sounds much more effortless and you’ll be able to hear more subtle emotions.