I haven't bought my own home theater setup, but I'm planning on getting the Onkyo HT-S650 (if and when they solve the LFE bug).
But, I've heard a few friends' home theater setups, and their center channel (dialog) always sound so quiet you have to strain to hear conversations. What's with that? Is that just the nature of home theater? And should I expect the same from the HT-S650?
Thanks!
Visna Kuru
Posted on
Yeah, center speakers suppose to be quiet, like in real life. If you go to the theater, dialog sounds fine, but explosions are ear-racking. The same thing can be done at home. You can crank the system so dialogue sounds fine, but may blow the roof when there are explosions. You can also tweak the system to increase output just on the center speaker.
Greg Lee
Posted on
The quality of the center speaker, just where it is pointed, reflecting surfaces near it, its delay setting, what receiver processing mode is used for Dolby surround, all these affect the intelligibility of dialog. Not just the volume. It's easy to get wrong. But I don't think receivers differ in this respect.
If you'd prefer yours a little louder, then adjust it! It's really a matter of personal taste. (I have my center a little louder than it "should be" for precisely this reason.) And a lot of my friends say, "Wow, that sounds so clear!"
Dialog is supposed to sound like it does in a movie theater - not too loud and not too soft.
Home theaters with hard-to-understand dialog typically have acoustical problems. They have hard walls, and lack the necessary acoustical treatment that real movie theaters have. The usual culprit is too much reverberation. The fix is proper acoustical analysis and treatment, so that the reverberation levels are under control and evenly matched over the whole audio frequency range.