I moved my hi fi out of the lounge a while back and am thinking of resurrecting the home cinema - previously I had SBL front left/right with the hi fi power amp driving these with the centre and both rears powered by a Marantz AV amp with a decent Linn Ekwal centre and Kef egg sattelites.

I am left with the Ekwal, 2 eggs and Marantz amp. I don't want to spend loads of cash so should I pick up another three eggs and flog the centre or just two and retain the vastly superior Linn centre? Or should I start again?

The Centre speaker's the third most important one in a surround-sound setup. If the Linn's so significantly better, you'd be well advised to keep it - although the Kefs might not be as good and are certainly tonally different to the Linn but that shouldn't be quite so important.

Not quite sure what you intend; is it to be a 7.1 surround or were you going to use the Kefs in place of the SBLs? If the latter then you'd be better off forgetting the surround thing and get a couple of good stereo speakers. Like SBLs!

65% or more of the audio ends up coming through the centre when playing movies. The centre is by far the most important speaker. However, it also needs to live within the soundspace so this is tempered by the question of balance. Provided the Ekwal and Eggs are similar in presentation style (and I don't think they are) then it's worth keeping it. If, however, the Linn is quite different to the Eggs, then it may be better to go the 'balanced' route and have eggs all the way around.

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Originally posted by Frank Abela:
65% or more of the audio ends up coming through the centre when playing movies. The centre is by far the most important speaker.

Don't really agree with this Frank; the audio content directed to the centre speaker varies with the particular mix. If you've got a dialogue-rich film then yes, it's the predominant speaker. It's certainly the most important to me in a three or more speaker surround-sound setup because I always struggle to hear dialogue.

However, were you to down-mix the audio to solely the centre channel the effect would be pretty poor and certainly not surround-sound! (leaving aside the likes of the single box multiple driver pseudo-surround speakers) Whereas distributing the surround sound mix to two stereo speakers would still have the dialogue and also the stereo effect.

Many folk on here are quite content just using their stereo speakers to listen to material mixed for surround-sound.

Therefore the left and right stereo speakers are more important in my book!

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Many folk on here are quite content just using their stereo speakers to listen to material mixed for surround-sound.

Absolutely. I'm one for sure.