temporary center channel solution?

[drewface]

so, i FINALLY have a chance to hook up my ascends as speakers for a "home theatre" (meaning, i'm home for the summer and have room to put a tv in, as opposed to my room at school where i barely had any room, so i was just using them for music), and they sound GREAT. anyways... i don't have a real center channel speaker yet, so i hooked up one of the small satellite speakers that came with my old RCA combo stereo thing (you know, one of those cheaper systems that has everything in one box). needless to say, the dialogue when watching movies isn't always as loud as i would like, since the ascends drown it out during some scenes.

would hooking both of these smaller satellite speakers to the center channel help at all with this? right now, i'm not using the other one for anything, and i thought having two of them acting as the center channel may help, but i don't know if hooking both speakers up to the same terminals would be a good idea...

any help on this would be greatly appreciated. (and yeh, i know a real center speaker would be the ideal way to go, but at the moment i don't have 300 bones to throw down for the 340SEc. i'm planning to get one for x-mas, or later in the summer depending on how well i budget my money.)

thanks

[curtis]

Have you calibrated?

[drewface]

yes, i have, and most of the time the speaker is plenty loud to hear, but when there are effects and dialogue, the dialogue gets slightly drowned out. keep in mind these are small, low quality speakers. the speaker cable is a really thin, built-in wire (the wire is attached to the speaker itself, with no way to remove it unless you want to cut the wire).

i just want to know if:
A) using two small speakers will make it sound better
and
B) hooking both speakers up to the same terminals is safe

[Lee Bailey]

Just run your setup using the Phantom Center Channel. Take the little center channel speaker out of the system. See how that sounds.

[Jorge_Burrito]

I am not sure about the whole hooking up two speakers to one outlet, seems like you would just be splitting the power in half (unless you seperately amp each speaker) and thus doing nothing. It certainly is a concern to have such an uneven sound stage.

If not willing to spend monet to get a center from ascend your best solution is to run a phantom center. This means going into your receiver settings and telling it you have no center. The receiver will then run the center dialog through your ascends and image it so that it comes from the center. This works well (it is what I am doing for the time being) as long as you are sitting in your sweet spot. If you are off axis the dialog will not appear to come from the center, but this is still a far superior solution compared to hooking up some poor nonmatched speakers. Good luck!

[drewface]

alright. i'll try the phantom center soon. maybe i can figure out a way to make the two smaller speakers surround speakers somehow... my room is sorta set up funny though, so i don't know how i would pull that off...

anyways, thanks for your help, guys!