Where to Start with Home Theater – Left/Right Speakers or Center?

You are just starting in your home theater journey. Eventually, you want a full surround sound system but you can’t afford all that right now. You know you need an AV receiver and at least a speaker or two. What do you buy first? Should you start your home theater with a single center speaker or a pair of left/right speakers? Let’s discuss!

Short Answer: Pair of Left and Right Speakers

The very short answer is that you’ll need to start your home theater with a pair of left/right speakers and not a single center speaker. This is because AV receivers cannot be set up with only a single center speaker. The minimum number of speakers you can start with is two. After you have your left and right speakers, you can add a center. You cannot start with a center speaker only.

Why Can’t You Start with a Center Speaker?

That’s a phenomenal question. Currently, all sound formats can be downmixed to stereo by your AV receiver. They will downmix all the way to mono (which is what you’d need for a single, center speaker) but won’t send that information to a single speaker. One can come up a lot of excuses why AV receivers won’t work with a single speaker. None of them really hold water. Technologically, there is no reason it shouldn’t work. It just doesn’t.

Our guess is that it is all about soundbars. Home theater receivers require you to start with at least left/right speakers over a single center speaker because they don’t want to be confused with soundbar setups. On top of that, most soundbars have tons of DSP to simulate surround sound. AV receiver manufacturers don’t mind using DSP to simulate different speaker configurations but they don’t want you to try and simulate stereo (much less surround) from one speaker. It never works as well as you hope and they’d rather you set up two speakers. Two speakers are capable of doing a lot more and sound much better than a single speaker. This promises true stereo and is at least capable of altering the phase of your two speakers to simulate surround sound.