How does the center speaker work? Doesn't the seperation get decreased with the speaker in the middle? Does the base stereo have this speaker?

 

There's a little man in there who sings along.

 

The bose option with a winning blue paint will get you a Smurf choir.

 

Even in a stereo setup, some of the music is played out of both speakers. For example, a singer's voice is normally center stage, so it is played equally out of the left and right speakers. The human ear is very sensitive to the direction a sound is coming from, so for a simple two speaker setup, you want them perfectly equidistant from your ears, so that the singer appears to be directly in front of you. This is hard enough to do in a living room, and even harder in a car.

A center channel speaker needs a processor. Like everything else, some processors are better than others, but even good ones aren't too involved. What this processor does is takes the left and right channels, and compares them. Any sounds that are replicated in both channels are passed onto the center channel.

I'll use a live comedy recording as an example. The comedian's voice will be center stage, so it will be at the same level in both channels. The processor will detect that, and pass it on full strength the center channel. So even if the left and right speakers aren't equidistant from your ears, or if something is in the way of one of them (like a passenger's leg), the center channel helps "center" the sound. In the audience, there might be a couple of distinctive (annoying) laughs. If one is way off to the left side, then the center channel processor won't pass it through to the center channel, and the laugh will only come from the left channel. If another is middle right, then that laugh is still going to be on both channels, but it will obviously be stronger on the right channel than the left channel. The center channel processor will pass it onto the center channel, but not at full level. This will also help aurally "locate" that particular laugh in the right spot.

The short answer is that a center channel isn't simply a mono speaker playing both channels. Because of the processor, it only reproduces sounds that are supposed to "appear" in the middle to begin with.

---jps

 

And no, the base stereo doesnt have it.