It is not you, the sound really is getting worse

@spenav, i was responding to the diy kit he linked which was priced at 225. For a 150ish bucks more, one can get a finished speaker with all the kinks ironed out by Andrew. Enjoy!

@erik_squires , I've had the best luck on center channels with concentric drivers (least disruptive!). I have the Elac Adante series by A.Jones for my hometheater and that center channel is awesome (though it is humongous and takes over your space)

However, i am wondering why a lotta guys here are complaining about dialogue issues in soundtracks. Turn up the center channel level ! Some receivers like the Yamaha Aventage series have an abundance of features like dialog level boost, height setting, etc. Dialogue intelligibility should not be an issue with a modern relatively higher end receiver with proper setup imo. Some of the comments i've read on other threads reek of huge knowledge gaps in hometheater speakers/receiver setup

On the bright side, if one likes music with a fusion of orchestral and electronic elements, movies and games have some amazing soundtracks out there. (Movies: Tenet by Ludwig Gorannson, Inception by Hans Zimmer, etc   Games: Mass Effect Andromeda!! by John Paesano, Deus Ex Mankind Divided by Michael McCann , Witcher 2 soundtrack, etc). I sure as hell am not a gamer. But, thank God, my son introduced me to this amazing genre of music.

@erik_squires , i could be wrong about this. But, i sense that when a native mixed DTS X or Dolby Atmos movie track is downmixed by a receiver to 7.1 or 5.1 because a user had fewer speakers, dialogue can lose intelligibility. Same goes for a native mixed 7.1 track downmixed to 5.1 by a receiver because the user had fewer speakers and so on.... This is quite possibly a limitation/inaccuracies in downmixing algorithms. Some manufacturers do better than others. I sense that Yamaha currently seems to have a slight edge on this from comparisons i have made with different receivers. Pioneers & Denons seem to do worse!

Why don’t you give this Uni-fi 2.0 center channel with the concentric driver a shot? Elac just released this model (a week ago) with the "trickled down" mid/tweeter from the more expensive Adante series.
https://www.elac.com/series/uni-fi-2-0/uni-fi-2-0-center-channel-speaker/?r=us
When i spoke to Andrew a couple of years ago, he mentioned he had spent a lot of time on the center channels. I paid 1500 for the Adante center channel and 200 for a dedicated stand back then. This is a really good price ($399) on the Uni-fi 2.0 for the same performance pretty much. You may want to factor in the cost of a dedicated stand as well.