Best speakers for home theater/voice clarity?

I always thought my dunlavy scIII's and my friends snell c4 and c5's were excellant on voices.

One issue is the Phantom Mode. You must realize that a center channel is really what you need. Secondly, room acoustics is usually 9/10 the issue. Keep the VR4's.

Thank you all for your help- there is a very srong consensus- I was planning on getting a new pre/pro (probably the Integra 40.1 or 80.1). If Audyssey doesn't dramatically improve things, I'll have to negotiate with my wife over the room treatments and WAF. If still not satisfactory, I'll invest in a center channel speaker and amp.

Up front, my sugggestion will fly in the face of audiophile dogma - but it may solve your problem. Many speakers have what could be called 'loudness' built into the design - an emphasis on the highs and lows - you may have to search a bit to find speakers that do not. Instead, you could try filtering to deemphasize the highs and lows. A kind of "de-loudness" effect. How do you tell when you have it correct? Two possible approaches. (1) base your adjustments on vocals / voices with which you are familiar. (2) Tune your filtering by comparison to accurate reference headphones - eg. Sennheiser 600's. The headphones and an inexpensive headphone amp will be a minimal investment when compared to new speakers. Behringer makes inexpensive filters and some manufacturers still include either high and low filters, or more elaborate schemes, in their preamps.

I second Musicnoise. Unless you have a problem with your setup then you are experiencing the prototypical midrange scoop - the VR4, like many audiophile speakers, is crossed over at 3.5 KHz - this is similar to most B&W's (for example). The large midrange will start beaming at around 1 KHz - so you tend to get a "scoop" or hole in the off axis response from 1 to 3.5 Khz...this is detrimental to voice intelligibility. This is well known in physics of speaker design but manufacturers prefer to build a speaker with boosted bass, recessed mids and boosted highs - it is cheaper to make and it sells....boom boom tizz sounds really good with music and will sell over a flat response in a shop floor A/B comparison (with untrained listeners)

Figure 1 is your problem and you need a speaker like Figure 2.

"Midrange beaming can be reduced by lowering the crossover frequency. The high-frequency driver’s lower range will then provide wider dispersion and the bass/midrange driver’s output can be rolled off before its dispersion narrows."