I do not have the space under my screen for a center M80, so I went with two M22’s. I haven’t heard the VP’s so I can’t really comment to their performance. They may be wonderful speakers, I just don’t know.
Another option is two M2’s and lay them horizontally. I have done that before with twin M3’s and they sounded great. One benefit with two bookshelves as a center channel is you can position them in numerously different ways. They can both be horizontal above or below the screen/tv with their tweeter together, or apart. You can put one above the screen/tv and one below ether horizontally, or vertically. Lot’s of options.
I wouldn’t do this with a tower speaker though. The tweeters are a good 30” or so away from the woofers, so the sound stage would be all screwed up if you lay them horizontally. With the little bookshelves, the effect is not nearly as great. Plus, if you have two bookshelves end to end, you effectively just evened things out.
One thing to keep in mind though, if you run two speakers in parallel, you just halved the impedence, so you’d be at 4 ohm again. In your case, I’d not go that route and just stick to a VP 150, or possibly one M22 in the vertical position. You could always by both, give them a try in your home and send the one you don’t prefer back to Axiom.
