Do’s and Don’ts of In-Wall Speaker Installs

High-quality audio is meant to be heard, not seen. But often times a bulky speaker system can be a distraction from the sound.

As a result, customers often sacrifice quality for the sake of appearance.

"It's not that they don't care about audio anymore, it's just that they've kind of moved on aesthetically," says Jon Herron, VP of sales at Wisdom Audio. "If they could have their cake and eat it too, that would be great. But if it's a choice between the appearance of the home that they've already purchased and the performance of the system that some installer is proposing, guess which one wins? It's not that hard to figure out."

Wisdom Audio developed the Sage Series of high-end architectural speakers to combat this dilemma. In addition to on-wall and freestanding systems, the series also includes award-winning in-wall systems.

"We created the Sage Series in recognition of the fact that there is a segment of the market out there that would like to have very high performance, and in years gone by would have bought big, imposing, floor-standing loudspeakers in order to get the results sonically that they'd like," says Herron. "But fewer and fewer of those people are willing to put up with the compromise to their décor just for the sake of the performance of the audio."

Wisdom Audio will feature the Sage Series speaker systems at EHX Spring 2010 (March 25-27 in Orlando, Florida). Herron shares the ins-and-outs of in-wall speaker installations.

Getting Started

Herron says prior to installing an in-wall speaker system, it is important to verify the solidity of the structure. Wisdom Audio's floorstanding speakers get down to 40Hz, while its in-wall subwoofers can go to 20Hz and below.

"Because our speakers do real bass, if you can, you need to make sure the wall is reasonably solid. If it's a poorly built or flimsily built wall, the wall itself is going to be shaking; that's not going to help the performance," says Herron.

"Normal 16-inch on-center wooden studs and standard dry wall actually works pretty well. If you want to get fancy with custom-built walls, or double-sheet rock, then you can do even more. But standard construction, as long as it's not really flimsy and sub-par, which is unlikely in the sort of luxury homes that our stuff is likely to go into, works pretty well. You just want to make sure everything is nice and tight."

Solid Developments

Wisdom Audio developed the SE Box solid wall enclosure for installations that involve materials such as concrete or masonry. Installers can nail the extruded-aluminum SE box directly to the concrete forms and run conduit and pre-wire before the concrete is poured. The form comes off to reveal perfect cavities in the concrete, where the standard in-wall speakers are mounted.

"All of our speakers have enclosed back boxes and you just take the standard in-wall speaker that you would otherwise be clamping to the dry wall," says Herron. "And instead of clamping it to the dry wall, you screw it directly into this SE Box, the solid wall enclosure around which the concrete was formed."

Wisdom has also created a specialty grill system for the SE enclosure. The grill is flexible and can follow the contours of a wall even if it may not have been plastered smoothly.

"To my knowledge, nobody else has really tackled the problem of what do you do in a situation like this," says Herron. "It's less common in this country than it is in Europe, but there are some parts of this country – Florida, and the Southwest for example – where solid stone or masonry or concrete walls are actually quite common. The standard mounting solutions, all of which particularly depend on clamping something to a piece of drywall, don't work very well."

Maximizing the Space

All of the speakers in the Sage Series are "bi-amplified planar magnetic hybrid" loudspeakers. This technology produces high-quality sound in a smaller product (the driver is less than three-quarters of an inch thick, Herron notes). Mids and highs are handled by a different amplifier than the bass, and there are two different amplifiers per speaker.

"One of the reasons we want to bi-amplify is that's how you get a deep bass out of a box that is otherwise too darn small to do deep bass," says Herron. "So we have an active crossover that allows us to throw a lot more power at the woofers than would normally be available.

"We also have parametric EQ that's specific to each model, and Audyssey MultEQ XT Room Correction to mitigate the room problems that otherwise you're stuck with. But the speakers themselves are, first of all, bi-amplified, and second of all, planar magnetic, which is to say that most of the sound that you hear comes off of the advanced thin film device. It has some huge advantages over traditional cone-and-dome sorts of speakers.

Herron adds, "We handle the hybrid part of that because we use a more traditional woofer for the bass. We use proprietary drivers our own design. In order to get the kind of bass that we're getting out of the space that's available to us in a two-by-four stud bay, you need to do some fairly extreme things in the woofer design.

"They can handle a tremendous amount of power. They have to, because the way you make up for a tiny box is with equalization and extra power to make up for the fact that the box is really smaller than you might have liked. But you're constrained by the wall, so you've got to do what you've got to do."

Room Correction

The high quality of a speaker system doesn't always match the acoustic environment it is placed in. Because of this, Wisdom Audio includes room correction with every system. It is a feature Herron strongly urges for any installation.

"If you want to get dependable, consistent results in a wide variety of customers' homes with a very different acoustic environments, I think you're crazy not to include some form of effective room correction," he says. "So whether you're installing relatively inexpensive speakers or really high-performance speakers, room correction is going to make the most of what is often a bad situation.

"That's even more true, I think, when it comes to architectural speakers. With big floorstanding speakers that stand out several feet away from the walls, you at least have the option of moving them around a little bit, or trying to tweak their positions as to get the best possible sound.

With in-wall speakers or on-wall speakers, you pretty much have to put them where the customer says it's OK to put them. You very rarely have a lot of freedom in choosing these things, and under such circumstances it becomes even more important to have some mechanism like room correction."

There are several options for room correction. Based on its results and ease of use, Herron has his own tried-and-true system.

"The Audyssey system, and our implementation of Audyssey's MultEQ XT, is a little bit different," he says. "We have our own, unique target curves, but the fundamental technology of MultEQ XT is remarkable in its ability to deliver consistently excellent results without requiring a Ph.D."

Click here for a complete list of participating companies at EHX Spring 2010.