how important is it to have 'matched' speakers?

[guitz]

I have a pair of KM-6's for front left and right...how important is it to have surround and center channel speakers that match the front speakers, in terms of how they sound and crossover settings? Also, what WOULD be a good surround speaker match , and center channel too, for the KM-6's? There are a pair of KG-3's , which are also floorstanders, but with a single 10" woofer, that I thought about getting and using as the surrounds, just because I figure they are very similar to my KM-6's, but, I'd really prefer something in a bookshelf size for the surrounds..then again, listening to music with 4 full sized speakers sounds intriguing! ..I dunno what to do.

[edwinr]

Hi.

It depends how dedicated you are to multi channel music and home theatre. If home theatre is going to be your direction in the future, I believe a very good quality centre channel speaker is essential. I suggest that the rear speakers, while obviously important, are not as crucial as the centre channel - at least for movies.

For true discrete multi channel music reproduction, however, I think ALL loudspeakers should have a minimum level of quality. In fact there is an argument that for the very best multi channel music reproduction, all five loudspeakers should be of the same quality.

If you are just getting started, I wouldn't be too concerned about speaker matching. Just get the best surround and centre channel speaker you can afford, and upgrade as money allows.

[garymd]

The front 3 are most important. The rears can be mismatched somewhat without too much notice. I'm not familiar with KM-6s but if they're in the same family as the center, you're OK. The size of the drivers don't have to match but the timbre sould be similiar so when the sound pans across the front 3, you don't notice a significant difference.

[guitz]

Thanks for the replies...multi channel audio is definitely what I'm looking at in the future...SACD in particular, but havning a nice, huge , powerful movie soundtrack playback is nice too!...I did try hooking up a pair of Yorkville YSM-1 studio monitors at one point and I kept getting the sensation that they sounded 'mismatched' with my KM-6's...the Yorkvilles have a soft dome tweeter and the KM-6's the radial horn...it just felt like the highs not cohesive..maybe due to different crossover points in addition to different tweeter materials, anyhow, ...fyi from what I understand , the KM-6's are exact copies of the KG 5.5's , so whatever would work good with the KG series would work the my KM-6's I would think.

[jdm56]

My take on timbre-matching for multi-channel music is this: If you want to gear-up for multi-channel mixes that use the surrounds just like the front channels, then you really ought to have identical speakers all around. But, if you are only interested in natural-perspective mixes, in which all lead instruments and voices are kept in the front three speakers, and the surrounds are used mostly for ambience and reverberation, then I think it is not nearly so critical to have identical, or even timbre-matched surrounds.

Personally, I favor the latter, for a lot of reasons. It's cheaper, in that you can use smaller surrounds. Set-up is much easier for the same reason. It's more natural. I have yet to hear live music where the performers were behind me. (yes, i do know there is some classical music scored for performers in the back of the hall, but is there enough of that in your music collection to base you system set-up on it?)