Sonix,
Welcome, perhaps, to the Salk family. Jim and the crew are amazing to work with, having recently joined myself.
I am a little confused by your phrasing. You mentioned that you are making a dedicated home theater, but then state that you like to listen in 2 channel.
Does this mean that HT or listening to music is the priority? I think it is important to establish what your goals are, and given that they both demand different things, you are going to have to prioritize one over the other.
For music, IME and IMO, there isn't a home theater receiver or processor that can compete with a well made dedicated preamplifier. Many moons ago I used to, in my dedicated "man cave," run a Pioneer Elite processor, it was in the ballpark of $1500 or so. It was obviously no where near something like an Anthem, Theta, or Classe, with these units costing 10K+, but let me tell you, it was EMBARRASSED by a 700 dollar tube preamplifier for music. It was startlingly the difference. I haven't ever heard as big of a difference in reproduction since that time. This revelation started it all for me, and I have been on a wallet destroying binge ever since.
If your top priority is high fidelity music reproduction, and you don't want the complexity of having both a preamp with HT bypass, and a receiver for HT, you can honestly do pretty well with a phantom center with your HT sources run through a DAC, and into the preamplifier.
I am running my Exotica 3s phantom center now in my room, and while I do mostly listen to music in there, the center image is outstanding for video games and movies. Its all about positioning.
If the room is dedicated, and you can place the speakers however you like, there are ways to help mitigate the image pull off axis. It will never beat a dedicated center for locking vocals to the center of the screen, but it can still sound great, and allow you to alleviate a lot of the complexity of trying to get top quality sound and a HT at the same time. That is, if you place music over HT listening.
For HT priority, you need to have three matching speakers for the front stage. IMO, worse than having the image move off axis, is a mismatch of vocals across a stage. Sometimes people pan across from left, center, to right, and a huge delta in sound quality here is overtly obvious, and really hurts the quality of the reproduction. I had this issue right before I decided to completely ditch multichannel HT in favor of high quality 2.0. I took the center channel out, completely removed the processor, and just started watching movies through my preamp and two speakers, instantly much happier.
IMO, I think that HT and music require two completely different ways of looking at sound reproduction. Most people who love HT that I have talked with are trying to replicate movie theater sound. Big, loud, pressurized; bombastic. IME most movie theaters I have been to, sound horrendous when compared to the qualities inherent in good two channel listening, refinement, texture, naturalness, openness, etc, etc.
Its all about what you are really looking for, and what matters most to you.
If you want a dedicated HT room that is geared towards movies, you need a center channel and a processor. You'll get outstanding HT reproduction, and good music reproduction. If you want a room geared towards music, you need a high quality preamplifier and two great speakers. You'll get outstanding music reproduction, and your movies will still sound pretty good.
Good luck.
