We’re having a small extension built (new dining room) and I’d like to install some speakers in the ceiling. I don’t know anything about them but like the idea of having music in the room without having to take up living space with traditional speakers.
I’d appreciate any advice the Doper community can offer on this. Is it a good / bad idea? Any other alternatives? Anything I should be aware of, such as spacing of the speakers? What are some good brands offering good sound and value? etc etc
I have it throughout my house, and even though I am a contractor, we just did the system as rubes, did not hire a professional.
We have it so it can just do surround sound in the TV room, or we can switch it to go throughout the house for music.
It was less than $700 if I remember correctly, and was just cutting a couple holes through the wall, and fishing some wires through. $700 was probably middle of the line, and I went to BestBuy.
A couple hours at most, and I truly love it, especially during parties.
There was some instructions on placement of the speakers that came with it, and I researched the general idea on the 'net. If you are ok having a pretty good system, I think doing it yourself is the way to go. If you need a very high quality sound, I would hire someone.
We don’t have recessed speakers, but the Bose system with one base unit on the floor, (behind the couch) then tiny digital speakers at each corner of the ceiling. They work great and were a snap to install.
They are a bit spendy, but worth the extra cost. We got ours at an outlet mall. They were the previous year’s model at a considerable savings.
I’ve always liked JBL speakers, though I can’t claim to have heard their ceiling mount speakers. But I see they do have them.
I would strongly suggest that you send mono summed signal to your ceiling speakers, not separate left and right chanels to separate speakers. You don’t want people in one part of the room hearing left channel only, and right only in another part. You can either sum the stereo in a small amp that feeds the ceiling speakers, or buy speakers that sum two channels internally. Actually, some arrangements have two speakers built into a single mounting unit – those are a little pricier and IMO not really worth it since with no separation there is no real stereo effect anyway.
Thanks for the advice, folks. I looked around a bit and settled on the JBL SP6C. They’re not mono-summed but the mono-summed ones were twice the price. These seemed about right for my needs. I can’t report on how they sound as the ceiling is still a few weeks away.
I did find that here in the UK there seems to be much less selection than in the US. As with most things.
On a related subject a friend has just gotten a Sonos system (upmarket multi-room wireless audio). These look really cool but a bit of an extravangance after what I’ve just dumped on getting the extension built. I may save up for this.
Once you’re up and running your sound, sit in various places and decide whether the stereo separation is bothersome – if in some areas of the room you’re only hearing the left or the right channel. If that’s the case, you may be able to change a few things on the back of your amp to send both channels to both speakers. Look for something called a bridged mono output.