I was in a process of replacing my hopelessly outdated home theater system (with some of the components as ancient as 12 years old). As I was trying to figure out what the individual pieces of this the new system should be, I decided to go with the JBL Northridge series speakers.

Unfortunately both of the center channel speaker of the JBL Northridge family are two big and heavy to fit on top of my TV, so I needed to look for an alternative.

After a while I settled on the Bose VCS-10 center channel speaker. Its specs looked quite promising: being only 6 "deep, 3.25" inches tall, about 7 pounds, and adorned by the famous Bose brand name logo, this choice appeared to be a no-brainer. And it looks not bad either.

I didn't let the fact that I couldn't find some of the detail specifications of this speaker (like the frequency range, etc.) anywhere, including Bose's own web site, bother me. So I went ahead and ordered this center channel speaker along with the rest of the components.

What can I say it does fit on top of my TV really well, and looks really good there. But that's where the list of positive things I can say about it pretty much ends.

It's too quiet when playing DVD movies. I've played with the distance to this speaker setting of my receiver (Onkyo TX-SR601), even tried to set it to a value higher than the actual distance, but it didn't help much. The only thing that does appear to work is to adjust the level of this speaker by the maximum value (+12db). The problem with this though is that then, when I play music CDs in any of the surround sound modes, this center speaker stands out too much. And you don't want to hear much of Bose VCS-10 while playing music (to put it mildly), since it sounds really bland and lifeless, especially in contrast to the JBL E100s that I use as my main speakers.

So now I need to change the relative level settings for the center channel every time I switch between watching DVDs, and playing CDs. A real pain in the neck!