I posted a while back about a room addition that has since fallen through.  Now my sights are set on improving my current family room audio/video.  Just bought the Sony 52XBR4 and need to upgrade my speakers.  The family room is a very wide open space that feeds right into the kitchen with no walls.  This will make it virtually impossible to get surrounds to the back side of the seating space.  My question is if I go with the 533VAC center, 2 533-T towers for L/R and a 10 or 12 inch sub, can I get away with the 632 in-wall or in-ceiling speakers as the surrounds?  Am I ruining a good start by going with these?  Can the in-wall speaker be used as an in-ceiling (prefer the square look)?

HI Jon,

Congrats on your TV purchase. Nice choice!

I'm a big fan of in-wall speakers for home theater. Well made in-walls sound fantastic for home theater use and really good for music as well. We just built a second demonstration room here at our office (blog and photos on this project coming very soon) and we were sure to install a complete inwall and inceiling speaker system for demo purposes.

Without a doubt, in-wall speakers make great surround candidates. As you probably know, the surround speakers are there to offer ambient sound, steer effects and reinforce what is coming from the front end of your system. It is important that they be timbre and/or voice matched with the other speakers in your system to maintain coherency. In fact, were you to place a pair of our 532-LR bookshelf speakers right next to a pair of installed in-wall speakers, I could switch between the two and you probably wouldn't notice any difference.

Placement is really important. Often an in-wall or in-ceiling speaker will allow you to put a speaker in a more ideal surround location than could be achieved with a bookshelf or satellite speaker. Send us some pics of your room and we'll have a look, but It sounds like in-walls will make a nice solution for you.

Last thing: The inwall and inceiling speakers use identical parts. One is rectangular, the other circular. If you want to install an in-wall speaker in the ceiling, go for it. I've done so in several installations.

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Caleb Denison

If you are worried about sound quallity and putting surrounds in the ceiling, don't. I know the ideal place is supposed to be at ear level, but sometimes it just can't be. My installation is a 7.1 using 4 422's as surrounds, put on the ceiling surface with adjustable mounts, I aimed these speakers at the seating area. I tried all kinds of ways to adjust these, setting this and resetting that, and la-de-da, getting good results most of the time, but a couple of weeks ago I ran the auto set-up feature on the receiver again, and saved it. Then went to the sub menu on the receiver and adjusted the volume individually on each surround, up 4db, and on the center, up 3db. Since then I think the system has sounded its best. Not that it ever sounded bad. The point is, the surrounds in or on the ceiling will give excellent sound reproduction and let the receiver do its automatic set-up. And after the speakers are run for about 100 hrs run the set-up again. You will be very happy. I am.

 

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Netflix will never run out of movies

Thanks Michael and Caleb.

 

I went ahead and ordered the 5.1 in-wall $999 deal today.  I decided to also buy the 533 VAC which I'll place directly above the TV and just not use one of the 5 in-walls in the package.  Turns out I didn't have room in the built-in cabinet to put the towers next to the TV.  So I'm now going with L/R and Surrounds as the in-walls with the center and the 10 inch sub.  Bought an additional in-wall so I can pair it with the extra speaker from the package and I'll put those outside in the patio ceiling.  Now I'm officially eagerly anticipating their arrival.