Re: HT noobie.
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Originally Posted by Rotasol
Are you mentioning that the three fronts need to be the same brand?
Will the difference in front mains, and center have a serious negative affect?
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To quote from Wikipedia:
"...timbre is what, with a little practice, people use to distinguish the saxophone from the trumpet in a jazz group, even if both instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and loudness."
Timbre is the "color" or tonal quality of sound. With timbre-matched speakers the same sound from the same source will sound identical in all three speakers.
To use the Wiki example above, if you play the same jazz recording through two mismatched speakers, you should be able to tell the sax from the trumpet listening to
each speaker, but if you play them together you might find the sax on speaker "a" sounds exactly like the trumpet on speaker "b". (This is an exaggerated example, but you get the idea.)
Now, let's say there is a scene in a movie where a New Orleans jazz band playing a funeral marches from the left side of the screen to the right, and the music similarly pans from the left front to the right front speaker. With timbre-matched speakers each instrument will sound exactly the same as the music pans across the soundstage. The move will be seemless. But if the center speaker
isn't timbre-matched to the other two, all of the instruments will sound anywhere from slightly different to radically different as the music moves into and then out of that speaker.
How important this is depends on the listener. Some people will barely notice, others will find it so distracting it takes them out of the movie entirely.
This is not simply a matter of the speakers all being the same brand. It is a matter of materials and construction and components. Most speaker brands have a number of speaker lines at various price levels. Speakers at the same price level are likely to use the same tweeters, mid-ranges and woofers (if present), the same wood and construction techniques, the same cross-overs. These will likely be timbre-matched. But a center channel from the Klipsch RF-10 speaker set (MSRP $1494) is not going to be timbre-matched to the front left and right speakers from their RF-83 set (MSRP $7094.)
In theory two speakers from different manufacturers could be timbre-matched just by chance, but there would be pretty much zero chance of identifying them. And while any individual speaker can get good reviews, the thing about a multichannel system is that it is just that, a
system. A given speaker that gets stellar reviews might be wonderful if you use a pair of them to play stereo music, but that doesn't mean they're going to work well thrown into the mix with other speakers playing back anything from 3.1 to 7.1 channels of audio.
For movies the surrounds are mostly used for directional sound effects and dialogue, and there is less front-to-back than side-to-side panning, so timbre matching the surrounds to the front speakers is less of an issue. But for multichannel music you would likely want to have a full set of speakers designed from the ground up to work together. It is a little bit like a sports team. In theory an "all star" team made up of the best individual peformers at each position would seem unbeatable, but if they just show up and try to play without practicing together, they could easily get skunked by a "lesser" team that practices and plays together all the time.
Regards,
Joe
