I'm currently looking at purchasing a cheapish 4.1 or 5.1 speaker set
for my computer. I'm by no means an audiophile and altho I listen to
music some times (often of the compressed variety and midis) I'm not
really fanatical about it. I play games somewhat, which will be the
primary use for my speakers. I have a SB Audigy (1). Most of the
speakers available now are 5.1 but there are still some 4.1s floating
around (such as the Creative FPS1600) and last time I looked into
this, I found a number of people who had actually bothered to compare
4.1 vs 5.1 for a home computing/desktop set up found the centre
channel make little difference even in movies (which I won't be doing
much of since I have a PVR for that) for such a set up. This is not
really that surprising to me since in most set up, including mine, the
difference between the centre and the left/right speakers is probably
0.5 m or less (mine will be about 45 cm or so if I put the centre
speaker in the centre and around 10cm to one side and 90 cm or so to
the other side if I put the centre on the monitor). Therefore, it
would seem logical to ignore this aspect and just look for the best
valued speaker set I can find but would like to hear other opinions as
well.