The center channel is the most important speaker in a Home Theater system. It produces all of the voices that come from actors on the screen. Choosing a center channel speaker with great high-fidelity gives you the added benefit of something called “dialog intelligibility”, or the ability for the listener to clearly hear what is being said in the movie dialog. As with rears and surrounds, typical placement options in most home theaters require that the center channel speaker be horizontal rather than vertical. This means the speaker must have been specifically designed to be used in a horizontal configuration, just putting a vertical speaker sideways will not yield the necessary fidelity and desired dialog intelligibility for multiple listeners in the Home Theater.

That depends on what main speakers, the location of the subwoofer in single subwoofer systems, and what fits best for your setting.

Over the years we’ve found that many customers’ home theaters actually need small and unobtrusive center channel speakers. The SuperSat 60C and 50C are just such products. While they don’t reproduce the lowest registers by themselves, the Triton Two and Three based cinema systems already have a great solution to help them do so: the twin powered bass sections of the Left/Right Triton Towers! When you set up a TritonCinema system the Triton’s powered bass section handles the center channel bass information. By setting the Tritons to LARGE, the SuperSat 60C or 50C center channel to SMALL (with the suggested 120 Hz crossover, which will allow the 60C/50C to play as loud as the Tritons), and the Subwoofer to NONE, the receiver/processor will take care of directing the center channel bass information (which is mono) to the left and right main Triton speakers. Because you have two Tritons, the center channel bass will appear to come from right between them… right there with the center channel! It’s just like listening to a mono recording – everything appears to come from the center in between the two main speakers. It’s actually like having a virtual or phantom center channel subwoofer. Now the SuperSat 60C or 50C center channel will have great dynamic range and will sound like BIG, full-size, full-range speakers, but in the small, (and wall mountable) package many people need to “fit” in their space. Although the SuperSat 60C/50C speakers are designed to look very small, the drivers have been optimized to have very similar acoustic characteristics and output to the Triton Tower drivers. Looks can be deceiving, since GoldenEar has both the experience and facilities we had the pleasure to design all the drivers for the complete GoldenEar product line starting from scratch in our in-house laboratory, for a no compromise match in performance (timbre, dispersion characteristics, and output levels). So, the Tritons and SuperSat 60C/50C were, so to speak, “made for each other”.

If you have room for a full size center, or if you are using the Triton Seven or Aon bookshelf speakers as the L/R main speakers in your GoldenEar home theater with an outboard ForceField subwoofer, the larger SuperCenters are the ideal choice. These wider frequency range center channel speakers allow for a lower crossover point when used in a home theater setup that includes a subwoofer. This can be especially worthwhile if the single subwoofer is placed far away from the center speaker. Most importantly, the SuperSats and the SuperCenters are all designed to produce the same spectral response as the Tritons and Aons, with the same tonal balance from the limits of their lower range through to the top end. Their performance is a perfect match for the Triton Series Towers and the Aon Series Bookshelf speakers.

GoldenEar speakers will sound great right out of the box, but be prepared for some further improvements during the first 100 hours of playing time. Although there is nothing “breaking in”, critical listeners all agree that during the first 100 hours of use there are audible changes and subtle improvements in sound quality in any high-performance speaker system.