All I did differently as opposed to what the retail guy would have had them do was work WITH the physics of the room and the sound and picture my brother and sister-in-law wanted to experience. On an $8,400 original quote, we spent $8,300… but we spent it correctly.

My ‘personal opinions’ come from six and a half years of experience and CEDIA training where almost everything we did as a company was custom install. When you disappoint a customer in that field, it goes far deeper than ‘it doesn’t look or sound good.’ When that dissatisfied customer complains to their builder who complains to the architect, putting in the wrong gear can cost you a lot of money.

We used in-walls primarily in a Master Bedroom situation where the TV sat above a chest of drawers and the speakers were outboard left and right of that position. Usually no center channel nor rear surrounds nor subwoofer involved. We used in-wall and in-ceiling speakers made by SpeakerCraft (lifetime warranty) and Paradigm. We used surface mount speakers by Bose.

I believe if you look these up, Bob, you’ll find that the ‘customer comments’ rate all of them pretty highly. We configured each speaker in each location based on what that room called for, not whether they were featured in a magazine or internet article. Quite often we would use Paradigm in-walls (formal living room), SpeakerCraft in-ceiling (kitchen), and Bose surface mounts (patio or deck) in the same project.

You can use my ‘opinions’ or not, sir. I’m not here to make you happy.

By the way, I’m 57 now and a long ways from being ‘retired.’ I bought my first component system when I was 16 with my own money and I’ve been a lifelong student of good sound and picture when it comes to being entertained. I still subscribe to several industry magazines and I constantly search for small improvements on my current system. I consider it ‘fun’ and I’ll never be too old to indulge in that.

You can’t beat the look of properly installed in-wall or in-ceiling speakers. The company I worked for used lots of them in rooms where music was the sound being distributed. We used 10″ in ceiling speakers for the Rear Surrounds in most applications.

My whole point here is that the original article was written to make you think you’d have a Home Theater experience using in-walls. My response would be… you don’t know what you’re missing.

It boils down to How Important Is The Sound as part of the Home Theater equation?

NOTE: In a commercial theater application, the speakers – and there are lots of them – actually sit beside and behind the screen which is constructed of a fabric that is fairly transparent to sound. For Home Theater, you are trying to mimic that experience. Ceiling mount speakers just won’t get that done. The actor/actress speaks and you get the “voice from above”… and it sounds quite a bit less than divine.

Your problem with cheap, small speakers is the loss of warm, deep midrange and most of the bass. They simply don’t cut it in those frequency ranges.

The room itself is a part of your system. The Phase Tech’s mentioned above might be great in the author’s room but put ‘em in mine, which is fairly large, and they may not be able to generate enough SPL to where I don’t have to listen at ear bleed volume in order to hear everything.

Larger speakers have more cone surface and so they move more air. You get rich, full sound even at a low volume level… and that’s the difference between a good, solid system and one that you have to make compromises with.

The condensed definition of SPL is the pressure generated against your eardrum by a sound wave. Smaller speakers = less SPL = say goodbye to that Bass Response you loved.

These people called cabinetmakers have been beautifying ugly objects for years by giving them a proper home. Before you go remodeling your living room by tearing up the sheetrock to run the wires these in wall/in ceiling speakers require, you may want to look into the option of a new cabinet instead.

Unless your room is small and can be completely closed off, small speakers will never give you the rich, full, bass-loaded sound that ‘big box speakers’ will. They can’t physically generate the SPL necessary to do that, and no amount of staring at small speakers and wishing they sounded big will change that property of physics.

Lastly a nice big, crystal clear picture with little tiny sound to go with it is not a marriage made in heaven.

Some inwall speakers are very nice sounding… IF you prepare the wall environment they sit in properly. This involves installation of a backbox of some type. That wall is every bit as important to an inwall speaker as the box is on a regular free standing speaker.

Excellent inwall speaker companies, such as SpeakerCraft, have backboxes available for every inwall/inceiling speaker they sell. Typically these backboxes can only be used in a prewire/open studwall installation as most homeowners don’t want to do any sheetrock repair and repainting with their retrofit installation.

Nowadays with the number of concert DVD’s available, I would never use inwall or inceiling speakers with my new flatscreen unless I absolutely had to.