Different Front & Back Speakers

[brttlt]

who here has different front speakers than your rear surround?
I've heard your 2 fronts and center should all be the same...true?

[Jellodyne]

I've got Polk mains and a Polk center from the same family. My surrounds and rears are DIY project speakers, but they have a silk dome tweeter like the Polks. I've heard that you want your front three speakers to be as similar as possible so that one sound, like dialog, passing from one to the next doesn't sound different, and I tend to agree with that. I've also heard that it makes less of a difference if your rears don't match, and I think that's true to some degree as well. Ideally, all of your speakers would be identical, but sometimes that's just not in the cards. I mean, you think that the guys who came up with stonehenge had a pretty good handle on how to lay out speakers in a living room, and your significant other thinks that 2 speakers small enough to hide in the ferns should do the trick. In any case, realistically, rears don't handle anywhere near the kind of load the mains and center do, so it's really mainly important to have them but timbre matching is less of a big deal. All IMHO of course.

[I 8 Piglet]

I'm in the same boat as Jellodyne, I have matching Polks up front and Wharfdales in the back. Sounds fine to me.

[Dilmo]

I have mixed also.

[Iguana Man]

Mine are not, they are by the same company, but certainly not the same. In my case, my fronts are floorstanders (towers) while the rears are of the bookshelf kind.

Supposedly, from what I've read, the front 3 being the same will provide a better chance of the front sound stage being 'seemless'. Meaning the sound pans from left to right and vice versa in a seemless way and with the same sonic characteristics. I don't have that either. However, my center has similar mids, again from the same company, and the sound is pretty good. I may one day get a bigger center to make the sound characteristics match even more, but for now I'm pretty happy.

However, if I had the room and the $$$, I'd have 5 of these .

Never happen, but I like to dream!

[tomdkat]

My front mains are Pioneer Elites and my rear surrounds are ancient Infinity''s. If you cruise through the "Your Home Theater" forum, you can see who has which speakers and see the various combinations, etc.

Peace...

[Shadowman82]

I don't use the same type of speaker all around but they're all from the same manufacturer .

The fronts should definetly all be from the same manufacturer but the rears as well as the sub can be from any manufacturer .

However I tend to think that most good speaker brands should have more than enough to offer so that you could have all speakers from the same manufacturer .

[chlngr1970]

Front = CR9 Boston Accoustic CR9, Center CRC...Rear Cr7, rear Center CR6...


FWIW...

j

[kamlesh]

Front 3: Wharfedale. Surrounds: Sonodyne. Mix and match yes, mismatch no. They do fine.