Quote:
Originally Posted by
commsysman 
You guys can stand around and pat each other on the back all you want, and you still are dead wrong.
In-wall speakers almost invariably do not have the proper volume, enclosure mass, bracing, or damping needed for proper driver operation. Those are just a few of their basic failings.
As others have said, not necessarily. A sufficient volume filled with good damping material (fiberglass or Bonded Logic recycled denim insulation) will work just fine.
In-walls have some serious advantages, in terms of diffraction (unless there's a lot of stuff on the front wall), efficiency (no "baffle step" that requires compensation), and so on. They also have the disadvantage of being un-aimable. If one can construct angled walls to properly aim the speakers, like so:
(
Source.)
then in-walls can be far superior to in-the-room speakers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
commsysman
As any competent speaker designer knows, the very fact that they have to be designed to fit in the typical thin wall compromises the enclosure design in fatal ways, no matter how high the cost or how good the designer. Ask any speaker engineer if you really want to know the truth. Calling my comments ridiculous displays a total lack of actual speaker design knowledge. It says nothing about me, and a lot about you, when you dismiss me as a dork based on zero knowledge!
So, Andrew Jones fatally compromised the design of the four-figure Pioneer EX in-walls by not giving a back-cabinet for the woofer? (The concentric driver is in its own braced subenclosure.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
commsysman
The speakers I have at home are Vandersteen Model 3A ($4500+) at one home and Gallo Acoustics CL-3 ($1700) at my other home. Does that sound like "budget home-brew" to you?
No, but neither speaker is objectively very good, either. Both speakers are very colored, in fact. The Vandy has decent on-axis performance but requires a lot of careful room treatment to sound decent due to the abysmal horizontal polars. See Klippel, Toole, Olive, etc.
The Gallo is even worse, with not only a very midrange-heavy on-axis response due to Mr. Gallo's lack of understanding of basic crossover circuit design, but also a mushroom cloud-shaped midrange polar response due to the poor directivity match between the 1970s Pioneer piezo tweeter clone and the too-large cheap midwoofer.
As for "best" in-wall, I don't know. I'm very impressed with the
Pioneer EX's. So impressed that when I heard them I scrapped my ground-up design for a design based on their components. Mr. Cowan's Unity horn system, supra, or PaulW's "Octagon," are the most thoroughly thought-out in-wall installations known to me, though I've heard neither one.
