But the once-ridiculed category has re-emerged, surprisingly pumped and ready to kick sand in the face of that conventional wisdom. Low interest rates and new-home construction have helped fuel interest in what's now called “architectural audio,” since it's easier to wire a house for sound during construction. Homeowners are rolling the cost of these systems into their mortgages or construction loans, making them more affordable. Empowered by improved performance and revitalized by the architectural audio trend, “invisible” speakers are now credible alternatives for people who want good sound as well as an uncluttered décor.
Sales of in-wall and ceiling speakers are booming because more and more people want to enjoy music in places like kitchens, bathrooms, even hallways and foyers that have little or no space for conventional speakers. Add to that the explosion in surround sound driven primarily by DVD movie soundtracks and multichannel music, which require multiple speakers spread around a room, and it's no surprise that even enthusiasts are using in-wall and ceiling models as rearward surrounds in their systems.
There's another reason for the in-wall/ceiling renaissance. The trend favoring wide-open floor plans and clean, streamlined spaces over traditional rooms with 8-foot ceilings doesn't lend itself to big floor-standing or even bookshelf speakers. And everybody wants a flat-panel TV, which has only added to the demand for unobtrusive speakers.
“People who live in these open environments don't want to see bulky boxes on their floors anymore, unless they're into high-end audio,” says Tom De Stio, director of custom sales at Harvey Electronics, based in New York City. Or as Barry Weiner, owner of Hudson Valley Home Media in Nyack, New York, puts it: “If you're looking for clean, unbroken lines, what could be less noticeable than in-wall speakers with grilles you can paint the same color as the walls? We've used in-wall and ceiling speakers exclusively in our last three installations, including one where we installed in-walls around a plasma display, with the surround speakers mounted in the ceiling over the sofa. That sort of installation is becoming increasingly common.”
Sound Improvements
Despite these trends, in-wall speakers would still face an uphill battle for acceptance if the sound quality of the speakers hadn't dramatically improved. While a lot of early built-ins looked and sounded suspiciously like repurposed coaxial car speakers, many of today's models use the same high-quality drivers and crossover components found in conventional box speakers. More important, they're designed to deliver high-performance sound from a wall or ceiling.
Atlantic Technology's ICTS 6/3 ceiling speaker (left) has two 3/4-inch tweeters for mono, stereo, or dipole sound, while SpeakerCraft's AIM8 ceiling spearker has pivoting 1-inch tweeter for directing the treble.
“For a long time, there weren't a lot of speaker companies involved in that business,” recalls Scott Ranney, president of Progressive Audio in Columbus, Ohio . “And in all honesty, many installers would go into expensive homes and recommend in-wall speakers that cost a couple of hundred dollars, even though there was a $100,000 area rug on the floor.”
Mike Detmer, vice president of Niles, which specializes in custom audio, says that when the in-wall category started to expand a decade ago, many speaker companies viewed the emerging market as a nice incremental business but not a particularly important one. “Speaker manufacturers tended to believe in a specific technology — typically for drivers — and felt that if they stuck that technology everywhere, they'd have great sound. It wasn't that they were bad technologies, but they didn't really understand the marketplace or the application, and they didn't tend to invest in it.”
We've also seen an important cultural change, Detmer says: people now want products to adapt to their lifestyles instead of the other way around. “Back then, big, freestanding speakers and amplifiers mounted in racks were the marks of a true aficionado. That doesn't hold true anymore,” he says.
These days, speaker manufacturers from Boston Acoustics and Polk Audio to B&W and Thiel offer in-wall and ceiling options, which has helped stamp the category with legitimacy. Even companies like Bose, Atlantic Technologies, and Cambridge SoundWorks, which cut their teeth on systems consisting of tiny satellite speakers with separate subwoofers, are now offering in-wall and ceiling alternatives.
While the emphasis may be on lifestyle, people still expect good sound from reasonably priced products, and meeting that expectation with “invisible” speakers isn't without its challenges. For instance, the sealed enclosures for conventional speakers allow designers to optimize drivers for the cabinet's size and construction. But it's anybody's guess what an installer will find once he opens a wall or ceiling to mount a speaker. Also, conventional speakers are usually positioned at ear level facing the prime seating location, but in-wall speakers seldom are, and ceiling speakers can't be, which makes it challenging to create a convincing stereo or front-stage image.
“Ideally, we'd like everything on the same plane where we're sitting,” explains Harvey Electronics' De Stio. “When I install a plasma TV, I usually recommend putting it 4 to 4 1/2 feet up the wall, with the stereo or left/right front speakers flanking it. If the plasma is there, then locating the speakers that low in the wall doesn't look bad.”
Looking Up
The trend toward open architecture often means that there isn't a wall available for speakers. And if there is a free wall, the speakers have to compete for space with artwork, cabinetry, furniture, and other potential obstructions. That's where ceiling speakers come into play.
Both the tweeter and the woofer pivot independently in the Niles DS Directed Soundfield series of ceiling speakers. The mounting bracket allows the speaker location to be set before the sheetrock is in place.
But even that solution has problems: ceiling speakers frequently have to be installed far from the main listening area, and even at irregular distances from it, to maintain symmetry with lighting fixtures. Sometimes they're even installed in vaulted ceilings, putting them at angles that might not be optimal.
“It's difficult to make a ceiling speaker whose sound is as well balanced as an in-wall's,” says Atlantic Technology president Peter Tribeman. “When you're listening to in-wall speakers, you're for the most part facing them, just as we've been hearing speakers for years. But ceiling speakers fire downward and hit the top of the head before traveling down to the ears — making that sound right is a major challenge.”
While these issues might not matter when ceiling speakers (or in-walls, for that matter) are used mainly for background music, they become important when these speakers are enlisted for more attentive listening, as in a home theater. Manufacturers are addressing in different ways the problem of changes in a speaker's tonal balance because of where it's placed, including the use of variable crossovers or switches to adjust how “hot” the tweeters sound. Niles, SpeakerCraft, and others use pivoting tweeters and woofers that can be separately adjusted to compensate for imaging problems arising from poor positioning. Niles calls its technology Directed Soundfield (DS), while SpeakerCraft sells its “directional” speakers under the AIM label.
“DS lets you direct the sound field into a room, effectively thwarting a lot of the problems that architects — and interior designers — give you,” Niles's Detmer says. “So you can place a speaker where it looks best and still get great sound by directing it where you want, like aiming the spray from a shower. You can now create a whole home theater system using ceiling speakers, which just wasn't possible before.”
But not everyone endorses that approach. Thiel, for example, tackles this problem by recommending its PowerPoint on-wall models featuring an angled coaxial driver. “If we used pivoting drivers, they couldn't be rigidly mounted in the baffle, and we think drivers need to be mounted extremely rigidly because you want all of the energy from the amplifier to go into moving the diaphragms, not vibrating the enclosure,” Thiel president Kathy Gornik says. “You really want to anchor these things.”
Back Support
There is less debate about the use of “back boxes,” which are enclosures that can be mounted behind the drivers to help control the acoustic variations of wall and ceiling cavities. Because the characteristics of the back box are known, the speaker can be optimized to achieve predictable sonic performance, help reduce acoustic reverberation within the walls, and decrease the sound bleeding into adjacent rooms. Also, many commercial — and some residential — installations must use steel back boxes to meet fire and building codes.
Meridian's DSP 420 in-wall speaker (shown here with a sealed preconstruction enclosure) has separate built-in amplifiers for the bass and treble.
“A speaker has to have its back wave contained, regardless of whether it's an in-wall, an on-wall, or a freestanding model,” Gornik says. “Otherwise you have a lot of rear acoustic energy going into the wall and vibrating whatever's back there, whether it's drywall or studs, which creates a subtle form of distortion that reduces the clarity you should be hearing.”
Atlantic Technology's Tribeman is also a back-box believer. “You don't know what's behind the wall or how much space there is. When you have a sealed box, you know what you're working with.” Some companies, such as Triad and Focal–JMlab, believe in the concept so strongly that their in-wall and ceiling speakers include cabinets that can be mounted directly in the wall.
Producing deep bass in a highly resonant environment like walls is also a challenge, so maybe it's no surprise that many installers prefer using freestanding subwoofers, which can generally be hidden fairly easily. But more and more people want subs that can be placed in walls, in the floor, and even in ceilings. Many of the companies that offer in-wall speakers, such as Atlantic Technology, Boston Acoustics, Niles, and SpeakerCraft, also offer in-wall subs, typically with an external power amplifier that can be placed out of sight.
“We tend to use freestanding subwoofers, and sometimes we'll open up the floor, install a standard subwoofer, and put a cold-air return cover over it,” Progressive Audio's Ranney says. “But it's pretty rare for us to do an in-wall subwoofer. That's an uphill battle, because the sub is going to vibrate a big area of drywall, and that adds a lot of colorations to the sound. To do it right, you might have to rebuild the wall. So a sub in the drywall would be our last resort, but it's still better than no sub at all.”
Sound Choices
Typically, in-wall speakers are rectangular, and ceiling speakers are circular — there's no real reason for this except that we're used to seeing rectangular objects (pictures, mirrors) on walls and circular objects (lights) on the ceiling. Most in-wall/ceiling speakers follow this pattern, but several companies are using unusual designs and technologies that belie their products' traditional appearance.
Triad's Gold/6 Omni series (left) lets you mount from left, center, and right speakers in the ceiling; Definitve Technology's UIW BPZ/A in-wall/ceiling speaker (center) uses a bipolar design to create a more diffuse sound; the Sonance Symphony 622T in-wall speaker (right) has a pivoting 1-inch tweeter, and its mounting bracket can be used with any speakers in the Symphony line.
SpeakerCraft, for example, has a 7-foot-tall in-wall called the Rogue that sports eight 5 1/4 -inch magnesium/aluminum woofers and a 6-foot planar-magnetic ribbon for the high frequencies. Of course, it costs $50,000 a pair! The company also offers a 1,000-watt ceiling subwoofer. And B&W has incorporated some of the technology from its ultra-high-end Nautilus freestanding speakers in the Signature 8NT ($1,700 each). The Nautilus tube, for instance, is tapered to absorb the tweeter's back wave and reduce unwanted colorations.
Meridian 's DSP420 in-wall speaker ($5,000 a pair) is unique in having separate 85- and 65-watt amplifiers for bass and treble, respectively, built in along with digital signal processing to adjust the sound to taste. Lower down the price curve are Atlantic Technology's TriMode ceiling speakers ($275 to $400 each), which feature a pair of offset tweeters that can be driven in phase (bi-pole) for music, out of phase (dipole) for surround sound, or in stereo.
But one of the most interesting in-wall speakers is from Sound Advance. The SA2 ($1,000 a pair) is a planar-magnetic flat-panel speaker that actually replaces a portion of the drywall. Once installed with the supplied vellum overlay, it can be covered with paint, wallpaper, or several textured finishes, rendering it completely invisible.
“It's a very cool, unique product, especially for homes that have serious artwork, where the owners want nothing on their walls except art and lighting,” says Harvey's Tom De Stio, who typically marries the speaker with either an in-wall or in-floor subwoofer. “It actually becomes an integral part of the wall. For decorators who don't want to see even a micro-grille, it's a perfect solution.”
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SELECTED MANUFACTURERS
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a/d/s/ AES Atlantic Technology B&W Loudspeakers Bose Boston Acoustics Cambridge SoundWorks Canton DCM Definitive Technology Dynaudio Energy FOCAL–JMLAB Infinity Jamo JBL KEF Klipsch Legacy Audio M&K Sound |
MartinLogan Mirage MTX Audio NHT Niles Audio Paradigm Parasound Phase Technology Polk Audio PSB RBH Russound Sapphire Snell Sonance Sound Advance SpeakerCraft Thiel Triad Wharfedale |