OT: Divergence in Center Chan Dialogue?

[Eric Seaberg]

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch NCIS Wednesday night (DVR'd) on my surround system, which brought up some questions. I'm sure there will be as many opinions as users...

I love dialogue in CENTER as opposed to phantom, yet I usually have about 20% divergence from center spilling into LEFT/RIGHT just to widen the 'hole' a bit. This is easy to do on the SSL C200 we have, as divergence is adjustable from -100% through 0 to +100% (clockwise). From 0 to -100% removes signal from Center and adds to L/R, keeping the overall SUMMED level the same (especially on the downmix). From 0 to +100% adds to L/R keeping Center at full volume, adding to the summed level in the downmix.

Since I run +20% typically I compensate in the Dolby downmix by dropping CENTER channel metadata from -3dB to -4.5dB. This works great for my stuff.

SO back to NCIS... it sounded like there was some divergence in the dialogue, pretty close to +20%. I should've switched back-n-forth between 5.1 and LtRt, but that would've put the wife over the edge a little too quickly.

SO (1) what are most of you TV mixers doing and (2) do you compensate at all in the metadata for Dolby?