Posted by Dave Peterschmidt [ 68.117.99.116 ] on March 27, 2005 at 07:40:28:

In Reply to: horizontal line array for center. posted by justinc on March 23, 2005 at 09:03:19:

justinc,
I'm going to be running into the same issue and have been pondering what to do for a center. It seems every choice has some fairly large compromises. The thing I don't like about using a horizontal array is that the center handles most of the voicing in a HT, so centers really need to be well controlled vertically so first reflections don't muddy the voices. Just flopping an array on its side puts the ribbon tweets on their sides also, which means high vertical dispersion. As Jim suggested, you could orient a single tweet vertically, but then you've got point source vs line source issues, both in trying to match the center to the tweeters in your mains, and in trying to balance the center's woofer array with it's own tweeter. (At least I'm assuming you'll have arrays as mains here) I was kicking around some ideas such as using an array on its side but perhaps holding vertical energy down by gluing a strip of sound absorbing material to the baffle above the tweeter array to reduce the HF energy aimed at the ceiling. Right now I'm thinking I'll play around with that and see how it works. If it doesn't, I think I'll just put a third array main behind the screen and use a microperf screen.

Let us know how it goes for you. This is a bit of a difficult nut to crack for arrays in HT's, IMO.

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