truly enveloping theatre-quality surround-sound experience begins with the centre channel. The Studio 520C centre-channel loudspeaker raises your home system to the next level with the kind of advanced technology that JBL® engineers developed for professional audio systems. The Studio 520C features a pair of 4-inch (100-millimetre) low-frequency woofers and a high-frequency compression driver surrounded by a glass-filled Bi-Radial® horn, a combination that delivers crisp, focused, dimensionally accurate sound. Using specially developed materials – including a ribbed PolyPlas™ cone and a Symmetrical Field Geometry™ (SFG) magnet assembly for the woofers – the Studio 520C delivers powerful and focused bass sound. A compression tweeter housed within the same type of Bi-Radial horn that JBL engineers developed for concert sound systems delivers high frequencies that are equally distinct and precisely aimed.
https://www.jbl.com/STUDIO+520CBK...tent=Louds
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The center speaker really only has two benefits over a phantom center. First is anchoring dialog to the screen for people sitting off to the sides of the screen, and second is allowing you to turn up the center channel mix's volume if necessary. "Better" sound has never been a reason to use a center speaker in the most cases. The center speakers themselves are a terrible design 95% of the time. The ironic part is that so many people use these horizontal MTM designs for the listeners off to the sides, while at the same time, due to the lobing effect due to the design, those side positioned listeners are getting poor, mismatched sound. My room is shallow and wide, so I do use a physical center speaker. It is identical to my mains and vertically oriented.
The "fix" is to raise the tweeter slightly above the axis of the midranges, but this too generally sounds bad.
The best option for a center channel is to get a third speaker, the same as the front left and right". Failing this, any speaker with vertical arrangement of the woofers.
Otherwise, they can do a WTMW design where the two W woofers are on a horizontal axis and the tweeter and midrange are on a second, vertical axis. The WTMW design is harder to find.
The center speaker really only has two benefits over a phantom center. First is anchoring dialog to the screen for people sitting off to the sides of the screen, and second is allowing you to turn up the center channel mix's volume if necessary. "Better" sound has never been a reason to use a center speaker in the most cases. The center speakers themselves are a terrible design 95% of the time. The ironic part is that so many people use these horizontal MTM designs for the listeners off to the sides, while at the same time, due to the lobing effect due to the design, those side positioned listeners are getting poor, mismatched sound. My room is shallow and wide, so I do use a physical center speaker. It is identical to my mains and vertically oriented.
My decibel readings were right around 40 decibel, and the difference I saw according to the sound meter app was 2.4 decibel difference using the 520c and about 2.6 using the 530. They were very close and I don't know if I could tell the difference by ear but in my situation using the 530 would make things worse, not better.
If you have both a 520c and 530 I recommend trying to test things out yourself. It's free to download the apps and IMO relatively easy to take the readings and come up with your own conclusions. It's easier and cheaper to just buy the 520c vs buying a pair of the 530's and then selling one. Of course every situation is unique and you may get different results than me, but I would be interested to hear if anyone else tests them and to hear about your findings.
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