The Great Center Speaker
If you add a center speaker between the front left and right speakers, you'll notice a big improvement in sound quality. Here's why: All surround-sound tracks for movies include a center channel, which normally is the most important one, carrying about 60 percent of the total sound energy. Including a center speaker should always be at least a long-range goal, even if you can't get one right away.
When there is no center speaker, the center channel is split equally across the left and right front speakers to create a "phantom center" image, just like in regular stereo, but this is never as good as if you were using a proper, dedicated center speaker. It is critical, however, that the center speaker's tonal balance (or timbre) closely matches that of the front left and right speakers. In fact, the more alike all the speakers in your setup sound, the better; but the blend across the front is most important.
That almost invariably means that the center speaker must be from the same manufacturer as the front left and right speakers, and preferably designed specifically to match them. In general, you can expect all the speakers in a given line from the manufacturer to work well together, and companies often provide specific match-up recommendations on their Web sites.
If you have a pair of speakers made within the last few years by a big-name speaker manufacturer, such as Infinity, JBL, Paradigm, Boston Acoustics, Polk Audio, or Klipsch, for example, chances are very good that you can go out today and buy a center speaker that will match them very well. But if you have AR speakers from 1975, say, that's going to be nearly impossible.
Get Surrounded
Today's movies normally are made with 5.0- or 5.1-channel digital sound tracks that are carried over directly to DVD. That's five full-frequency-range channels--left, center, and right front and left and right surround--plus in many cases a bass-only low-frequency effects (LFE) channel that helps create certain intense sound effects, such as explosions.
Some recent movie sound tracks--ones that use Dolby Digital EX or DTS ES encoding--also have an additional back surround channel that can be reproduced by one or two speakers directly behind the listening area or split to the left and right surround speakers in systems that don't have the extra back speakers. (Dolby Digital EX was initially developed for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and it also was used for Episode II and the upcoming Episode III.) The main left and right surround speakers should be positioned more to the sides of the listening area whenever possible, either directly or pulled a few feet toward the back when there's enough space.
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