Why not use mains as centers

I helped a buddy set up a great home theater, with a lot of room, and we actually used a pair of Magnepan MMG's because he had the space and an extra pair, man they sound great. We had no interference problems, and actually just split the signal with a good DH Labs Y-splitter from the processor. It has worked great. It's a bad-a__ theater. All Maggies: IIIa up front (rebuilt at Magnepan), MC-1's for the rears, the pair of MMG's for the center and a single Velodyne DD-15 in a fairly large room. Very nice for music, great for theater. Anthem D-1 with an Innersound ESL running the fronts and a Parasound 2205 running all the other speakers, it's a really bumpin' home theater, turned out great.

All I know, is that where I have set it up, it sounded fantastic. Not sure of the physics behind it, but the 2 MMG's emitting the center works very well in a home theater I set up for someone in my neighborhood, who didn't want to give up his MMG's.

OK, tried the "phantom" center yesterday, and I hate to say this, but it didn't sound good at all. Very hollow sounding, I tried some other setting changes, but just turning the center on again was a huge improvment.

Since I don't listen to multi channel music, I kept my excellent Definitive Tech CLR 2500 center with the powered 8" sub in it, from a previous system, great speaker.

Actually, when I downsized my AV system to just video based a few years back, I got rid of my high end 2 channel stuff and just used a reciever and bought all Def Tech speakers (BP 7004's for mains) with no sub. Just used the subs built into the 7004's and that system sounded very, very good. I'm a huge Def Tech fan now, maybe the best value I have seen in speakers.

I have a receiver with Audessey (Denon 3808ci), and I have spent considerable time with main speaker placement of my Maggie 3.6's, so I'm going to say no, to the problems you bring up. It just sounds better with a center channel.