Best center speakers for dialogue clarity?

Once I installed a rather small audio system to compliment a rather large front projection system. The speakers were Linn Kans all around with a Velodyne 18" ULD sub with a run of the mill Pioneer receiver and LD player. That system, amazingly enough, had the most life like home theater sound I've heard to date. Not as dynamic much more clarity than DTS/SDDS in some damn good theaters here in LA.

I actually am very disappointed with My Maggie CC2 center...the tendency of Maggie's to lose all low-level detail below a certain volume forces me to run the center almost 10db hotter than my mains to make soft-spoken dialogue intelligible, while keeping explosions and other loud sound effects from blowing out my ears. As a result, dialog pans sound awful.

Maggies are great for stereo sound, but I would NOT, under any circumstances, recommend their center (at least the CC2)

The CC3 still requires a sub but I agree with you about its value as a center channel for clarity.

Handsdown the Magnepan centers are incredible for dialogs and convey accurate minute details. Its one of those purchases that make your head shake in disbelief at the level of detail reproduction, you can even sense the size of the room when mike properly. The older center requires good set-up w/sub as compare to the recent CC3.

On the flip side, I have found my Thiel SCS3 to excel at both music and dialog clarity. I had heavily considered the larger of the two NHT centers to go along with my Thiel 3.6's, but once I compared it to the SCS3, I was immediately blown away by the SCS3. The NHT sounded like a speaker reproducing music, whereas the Thiel sounds like musicians right in front of you. Very transparent and very smooth. The drivers interact very well, and you really can't hear the crossover points. For dialog, I have also been very impressed. Both DVDs and sports broadcasts sound great and are very easy to understand.

Hope this helps, Tom.

Dialog clarity is best with a speaker that has quite restricted frequency response, and therefore is lousy for music. For music you should have a center speaker that matches the Left and Right speakers, and use of a dialog speaker, alas too common, is the reason why some folk think that center speakers are a bad idea. So the solution is to have two center speakers, switched in and out as appropriate. The dialog one could be cheap.

Actually, I suppose it would be possible to make a good wide range music speaker with a built-in switchable circuit to alter its response for dialog use.

Aerial CC3 or CC5. I owned the CC3 and you can adjust it's tonal qualities with two switches on the back to match your main speakers (I did this with my NHT 3.3's). Unfortunately I had to put my system in-wall now.

I have a Paradigm Reference studio V2 that is excellent and I happen to be selling for $349 plus shipping.

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