Do I really need a centre channel speaker?

For movies, yes. The centre channel is the most important speaker in the room, and skipping it is the single most common reason dialogue sounds worse than it should.

Films are mixed with almost all dialogue on the centre. Without one, the AVR creates a phantom centre by sending that dialogue equally to the left and right speakers. That works only for the person sitting exactly between them. Everyone else on the sofa hears speech pulled towards the nearer speaker, and the anchor between voice and screen goes soft. In a typical Indian living room with a wide sofa and the family spread across it, one lucky seat out of five is not a good ratio.

Is there a case for no centre? Two, and both are narrow. A stereo music system that occasionally plays a film, with one listener in the sweet spot, does fine with a phantom centre. And a very small room where the front pair is barely a metre and a half apart makes the phantom image reasonably stable. Outside those, buy the centre.

The bigger mistake I see is buying the wrong centre. If the budget forces a choice today, buy a better front pair now and add the matching centre next, rather than a random cheap centre from a different brand or series. A mismatched centre is worse than none: voices change character every time a sound pans across the screen, and the seam is audible from any seat. The rule we hold on every installation is centre from the same series as the front pair, so the three speakers across the front sound like one instrument.

Placement matters as much as purchase. Get it as close to ear height as possible, angled up if it must sit low, and never inside a closed cabinet shelf. A good centre firing into the back of a TV unit is a good centre wasted.

Tell us your front pair and I will tell you which centre matches it, and whether your TV unit is going to let it breathe.