Home Theater center channel sounds muffled?

Question

OK, here is the story. I had a Sony Dream Theater "Home Theater in a Box." I started getting a high pitch squeal from that system. I determined that it was coming from the receiver/dvd player. I bought a Harmon Kardon AVR247 7.1 surround sound receiver to replace it. I figured that I would be OK with the old speakers. They are 4 ohm. I am assuming that most home theater speakers would be 8 ohm. Everything seemed to work OK to begin with, but then I noticed that that the dialogue was very difficult to hear especially when watching HD channels that were encoded in true Dolby Digital. I found that when I turned off the center channel and the audio normally piped though the center channel was sent to the Front L/R it sounded much better. That's the history. The question is... Should I expect issues when using the speakers from the "Home Theater in a Box" speakers with my new receiver? Are the old speakers designed for use only with the Sony box?

Answer 1

That AVR receiver has a feature you may not have set:

- An offset of +/- volume for the center speaker

- An offset of +/- volume for each rear speaker

So you can add some volume to the center speaker to make it match the L/R with this setting.

A setup DVD and a Radio Shack sound meter is used to help you adjust these settings so all your speakers are balanced.  See if you can NefFlix a copy of "Digital Video Essentials" or "Avia". These disks both contain a tutorial and test-tones to make this adustment.

Answer 2

Try connecting another of your surround speakers in place of the center speaker and see if everything works fine or not. I suspect a blown center speaker's high frequency driver (tweeter).

Secondly check the settings of your center speaker in your reciever. Are all the parameters correctly entered ?

A word of caution - Don't drive your present speakers at very high volumes. You could end up ruining your equipment.