Cheap Wharfedale Emerald Center-Channel Speaker (Rosewood Veneer) (Electronics) Price

The challenge for most center-channel speakers, apart from blending with the other speakers in a system, is to reproduce dialogue and music with clarity and naturalness while being small enough to sit directly atop or below a television. Achieving this boils down to using quality components and offering as much bass as possible while minimizing the boxy sound that follows small, oblong speakers like odor follows a garbage truck.

The Emerald Centre, we're pleased to report, eludes this boxiness altogether. Rather, the speaker sounds extremely natural and can best be described as "easy." Voices, music, and sound effects--all the crucial center-channel elements--stream from the Emerald Centre with honesty and a sense of effortlessness.

The speaker owes a lot to Wharfedale's extensive design work. The company uses computer modeling to minimize box coloration, while patented, mineral-loaded homopolymer plastic woofers dampen unwanted resonance and ensure dynamic performance. Further, the Emerald Centre's sweet silk-dome tweeters were designed using laser interferometry, a process that helps calculate optimal measurements by examining the interference of light waves.

Still, size counts for something, and center channels larger than the Emerald Centre will offer beefier bass output--a boon to multichannel music and to the reproduction of DVD soundtracks mastered in Dolby Digital 1.0, where all the sound comes from the center speaker. But the Emerald Centre makes up in accuracy and neutrality what it sacrifices in the low end. Fans of multichannel music (such as DTS-encoded 5.1-channel CDs) may want a bigger center speaker, but otherwise this works great.

If you're buying a set of Wharfedale Emeralds, the Emerald Centre is a no-brainer. But it's also a great place to start a system upgrade if you're graduating from, say, a small Dolby Pro Logic setup with cheaper speakers to a home theater capable of delivering full-fledged Dolby Digital/DTS 5.1-channel surround. --Michael Mikesell

Pros:

• Open, airy sound quality
• Melds seamlessly with other Wharfedale Emerald speakers
• Not the least bit boxy-sounding
• Inconspicuous front-panel appearance
• Beautiful wood finish

Cons:

• Limited bass output