Perlisten’s THX Dominus In-Ceiling Speakers Great Sound for EVERY Seat!

[Mikado463]

Crossovers are inherently a problem. For two reasons. The first is that they do significantly tend to alter the polar response, which takes great skill to minimize. Secondly they cause inherent phase and therefore time discrepancies.

Crossovers you say, Andrew Jones discusses ............

Andrew Jones Discusses Crossovers In Speaker Design

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[TLS Guy]

I've tried just about every full range driver, and your remarks are certainly true, with the possible exception of the Jordan full ranger, which I think was the best of the lot (it's been a very long time). However, the Jordan cone would amass dents and creases if you breathed too hard in the next room. I'm a little confused as to which version of this driver is currently available--TLS Guy seems to be saying that problem has been largely remedied.
Anyhow, my remarks only went to power handling, not radiation patterns. I'm sure Perlisten has done their homework in that regard.

Unfortunately Ted was not a detail man as far as build details, as my father and I found out fast. The drivers Ted produced under his brand were the most frail of the lot.

We actually got the JW driver very reliable, but back then it was all tubes, mainly 10 to 15 watt per channel. It became a different story when amps like the DCA 300 A appeared and even the Quad 405. Then those drivers got turned into cocked hats at regular intervals.

I still have quite a few JW modules, and used four originally as my Atmos speakers. However they started to fail. So then I bought four Mark Audio CHN 110s. They have held up well in this application, with zero issues. They are driven by Quad 405-2 amps. I do drive the system at concert levels. The JW modules and the CHN-110 model very well in TLs by the way. During my med school years I used a pair of JW modules in TLs, topped out with the STC (later Coles) tweeter, driven from my home built Mullard 10-10 tube amp, driven from a Quad 22 preamp, which I am still using on my Decca/Garrard turntable.

You can see that that CHN-110 which is basically the latest iteration of the JW module, is an excellent driver. You can see that it does have excellent dispersion, and it has a good FR right out to the listening position. My strong hunch is that is in fact a better approach than those exorbitantly expensive Perlisten units. So, I am going to stick to my view that, that driver is most likely the optimum choice for the Atmos ceiling application.

In summary, it is a fact that the only FR drivers that are of any practical use are ones designed and built to Ted Jordan's principles and patents. He got it right, and this should never be denied.

I know Gene is skeptical, but he is wrong about it not being possible to make a full range driver with good dispersion. You have to hunt, and basically have to be aware of Ted Jordan's work. I managed to stay friends with both Ted Jordan and Leslie Watts until their deaths. Leslie's family still stay on touch occasionally. Leslie Watts was a very nice man, and the very embodiment of the perfect gentleman.

 

[D Murphy]

Unfortunately Ted was not a detail man as far as build details, as my father and I found out fast. The drivers Ted produced under his brand were the most frail of the lot.

We actually got the JW driver very reliable, but back then it was all tubes, mainly 10 to 15 watt per channel. It became a different story when amps like the DCA 300 A appeared and even the Quad 405. Then those drivers got turned into cocked hats at regular intervals.

I still have quite a few JW modules, and used four originally as my Atmos speakers. However they started to fail. So then I bought four Mark Audio CHN 110s. They have held up well in this application, with zero issues. They are driven by Quad 405-2 amps. I do drive the system at concert levels. The JW modules and the CHN-110 model very well in TLs by the way. During my med school years I used a pair of JW modules in TLs, topped out with the STC (later Coles) tweeter, driven from my home built Mullard 10-10 tube amp, driven from a Quad 22 preamp, which I am still using on my Decca/Garrard turntable.

You can see that that CHN-110 which is basically the latest iteration of the JW module, is an excellent driver. You can see that it does have excellent dispersion, and it has a good FR right out to the listening position. My strong hunch is that is in fact a better approach than those exorbitantly expensive Perlisten units. So, I am going to stick to my view that, that driver is most likely the optimum choice for the Atmos ceiling application.

In summary, it is a fact that the only FR drivers that are of any practical use are ones designed and built to Ted Jordan's principles and patents. He got it right, and this should never be denied.

I know Gene is skeptical, but he is wrong about it not being possible to make a full range driver with good dispersion. You have to hunt, and basically have to be aware of Ted Jordan's work. I managed to stay friends with both Ted Jordan and Leslie Watts until their deaths. Leslie's family still stay on touch occasionally. Leslie Watts was a very nice man, and the very embodiment of the perfect gentleman.

Well, the price is right. I may give it a try, although from your OmniMic plot it looks like it would be pretty bright and jagged if something more revealing than 1/6 octave smoothing were applied.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Crossovers are inherently a problem. For two reasons. The first is that they do significantly tend to alter the polar response, which takes great skill to minimize. Secondly they cause inherent phase and therefore time discrepancies. The latter in the analog domain, which can now be ameliorated in the digital domain in active designs.
I know many have claimed that these time discrepancies are of no or little consequence. However many, and I include myself believe this is not true, and over time more are coming to our point of view.

In a design with spaced drivers and an analog crossover the polar response will always be skewed in some fashion. For a ceiling Atmos speaker, I maintain this is deleterious.

Now I agree that uncontrolled cone break up narrows the polar response drastically. However the work of Ted Jordan and the work we did on on the Jordan Watts module, changed that paradigm, with the unique design of the cone, that avoided uncontrolled break up. I feel highly privileged to have taken part in this development.
This was all covered in patents.

From the late fifties to the early seventies there was no other driver that had an FR anywhere close to as good as the JW driver. The problem was limited power handling and above all reliability.

Now the successor making use of these patents is in the hands of Mark Audio. and E.J. Jordan Designs.

The driver the CHN 110 is the closest successor to this technology.

Now I agree that an Atmos speaker has to have wide and even dispersion, and preferably a circular distribution and devoid of lobing issues that crossovers introduce.

I agree that most full range drivers have serious uncontrolled break up in the midband, that rule them out due to narrowing dispersion due to this break up and also a rising response.

This is not the case with the drivers I have selected.

This is the FR of my Atmos speakers.

The Blue line is 1 meter in axis, the orange line is 1 meter 30 degrees off axis.

The purple line is at the MLP!

Now I maintain that result is more than adequate for an Atmos speaker, and an excellent superior result.

I highly doubt those Perlisten speakers will be free of lobing issues, but you are welcome to prove me wrong.

I maintain the drivers I have selected are close to ideal in the ceiling Atmos application and at very reasonable cost.

In my view only a good full range driver or a good coaxial speaker can really perform well as a ceiling Atmos speaker.

Lastly I would point out, that I have around 70 years experience with speakers and their design, and I am not in the habit of developing or proposing anything other than optimally engineered designs.

I think you are a bit off on the needs for modern ATMOS speakers. The Mark Audio speaker would not be a great option and your attack on the Perlisten is largely unfounded.

The Mark Audio repsonse you show is clearly highly smoothed in an extreme aspect ratio plot. But ok, it could be EQed, that wouldn't change the fact that a Mark Audio (and all full range drivers) will beam more than a tweeter, causing very narrow HF dispersion.

Aiming a speaker straight down with equal dispersion in all directions (and while its true that the dispersion is the same in every direction for the Mark Audio, it isn't fair to say that it's equal in all directions at all frequencies, as the DI rises on that driver aggressively). The standard practice for top performance home theater designs involves aiming the ATMOS speakers at the listeners in order to provide good coverage of the seats and not the walls. Other attempts at this design have been miserably bad. Perlisten is offering the first true high end option with good measured results. You can aim the speaker and get excellent response and directivity.

But the Mark Audio severly lacks in output. These speakers need to produce, at the listening position, around 102dB per array over their operating range. There is no way the Mark Audio driver could do that. The Perlisten speaker is capable of achieving this in large listening rooms with high ceilings no problem.

There is no denying it is an expensive in-ceiling speaker, but when you consider the cost to procue such a speaker, which has an aluminum faceplate/waveguide, aluminum enclosure, premium crossover parts, and premium drivers, it is reasonable. Nobody else is offering an equal or better in-ceiling speaker for less money. This is a highly optimized design.

Your dislike of multiway speakers and crossovers I think is more personal preference than standard good engineering. We can debate this issue, but we can't indict a product because it happens to adhere to accepted engineering practices for good speaker design. Multiway speakers ensure high output, low distortion, matched consistent directivity over a wide bandwidth, and extended bandwidth. You can't do that with a full range driver. That is basic physics.

 

[TLS Guy]

Well, the price is right. I may give it a try, although from your OmniMic plot it looks like it would be pretty bright and jagged if something more revealing than 1/6 octave smoothing were applied.

They don't sound jagged though. I think that smoothing under the rough and ready test means for in room measurement correlates well with what is actually heard. There are no big peaks, but there are some low Q swiggles. There is good sound at the MLP as you can see.

Those speakers never draw attention to themselves and blend very well.

If you are going to use those drivers in a main speakers, I would recommend a first order crossover at around 7K Hz, certainly no higher than 9KHz.

I do have design that, I have never built for a couple of those drivers in MTM format in a TL. It would be a very cost effective speaker, and the crossover could be built without soldering skills using a terminal strip. I bet they would be very nice office speakers for instance, floor standing either side of a desk or other furniture.

My sister is still using a pair of JWs in an acoustic labyrinth I built her around 60 years ago. They are in her kitchen and in constant use, and still sound fine. They are true full range and no tweeter. They have been powered from a 10 watt per channel Richard Allen/Sugden class A integrated amp. Those amps have shown to be very long lived.

 

[TLS Guy]

I think you are a bit off on the needs for modern ATMOS speakers. The Mark Audio speaker would not be a great option and your attack on the Perlisten is largely unfounded.

The Mark Audio repsonse you show is clearly highly smoothed in an extreme aspect ratio plot. But ok, it could be EQed, that wouldn't change the fact that a Mark Audio (and all full range drivers) will beam more than a tweeter, causing very narrow HF dispersion.

Aiming a speaker straight down with equal dispersion in all directions (and while its true that the dispersion is the same in every direction for the Mark Audio, it isn't fair to say that it's equal in all directions at all frequencies, as the DI rises on that driver aggressively). The standard practice for top performance home theater designs involves aiming the ATMOS speakers at the listeners in order to provide good coverage of the seats and not the walls. Other attempts at this design have been miserably bad. Perlisten is offering the first true high end option with good measured results. You can aim the speaker and get excellent response and directivity.

But the Mark Audio severly lacks in output. These speakers need to produce, at the listening position, around 102dB per array over their operating range. There is no way the Mark Audio driver could do that. The Perlisten speaker is capable of achieving this in large listening rooms with high ceilings no problem.

There is no denying it is an expensive in-ceiling speaker, but when you consider the cost to procue such a speaker, which has an aluminum faceplate/waveguide, aluminum enclosure, premium crossover parts, and premium drivers, it is reasonable. Nobody else is offering an equal or better in-ceiling speaker for less money. This is a highly optimized design.

Your dislike of multiway speakers and crossovers I think is more personal preference than standard good engineering. We can debate this issue, but we can't indict a product because it happens to adhere to accepted engineering practices for good speaker design. Multiway speakers ensure high output, low distortion, matched consistent directivity over a wide bandwidth, and extended bandwidth. You can't do that with a full range driver. That is basic physics.

The issue is that I don't need 102db ceiling speakers. I personally like the Atmos speakers down firing. I don't want to ever fixate on a speaker. The four speakers help create a very realistic sense of ambience. That is what I want. Even so helicopters still sound impressive going over head.

If you look at the way I designed the room and ceiling in the picture, you will see that the outer walls are screened off by the architectural detail. I had already designed for that.

The bottom line is that the room produces a really convincing representation of concert halls, cathedrals and churches. It does fool you to give you the sense of being there. So I leave well alone.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

For those interested, here are the tech sheets on the new in-ceiling speakers. Compare these with the JBL and Klipsch equivalent and you can clearly see these are a far superior product. Yes more expensive, but better performance by a LARGE margin.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

The issue is that I don't need 102db ceiling speakers. I personally like the Atmos speakers down firing. I don't want to ever fixate on a speaker. The four speakers help create a very realistic sense of ambience. That is what I want. Even so helicopters still sound impressive going over head.

If you look at the way I designed the room and ceiling in the picture, you will see that the outer walls are screened off by the architectural detail. I had already designed for that.

The bottom line is that the room produces a really convincing representation of concert halls, cathedrals and churches. It does fool you to give you the sense of being there. So I leave well alone.

If you take a look at RP22 you will get a better sense why these were made and what goals they seek to achieve. These guys have to design speakers for the industry best practices being put out there. You might have achieved something wonderful in your space, but they can't design/produce speakers around those same standards.

Ideally we want speakers to be aimed, per those standards, toward the listener. It's not so much about calling attentiont to it, its about ensuring that the response and thus timbre matches the other speakers across all listening positions.

The output is necessary to achieve the artistic intent. Most people are fine to not achieve artistic intent, but when it comes to movies, anything short of reference levels has veered from the artistic intent. We all do it, and it's fine, but again, a THX Dominus system needs to be designed to achieve it. That is why this product exists.

 

[TLS Guy]

If you take a look at RP22 you will get a better sense why these were made and what goals they seek to achieve. These guys have to design speakers for the industry best practices being put out there. You might have achieved something wonderful in your space, but they can't design/produce speakers around those same standards.

Ideally we want speakers to be aimed, per those standards, toward the listener. It's not so much about calling attentiont to it, its about ensuring that the response and thus timbre matches the other speakers across all listening positions.

The output is necessary to achieve the artistic intent. Most people are fine to not achieve artistic intent, but when it comes to movies, anything short of reference levels has veered from the artistic intent. We all do it, and it's fine, but again, a THX Dominus system needs to be designed to achieve it. That is why this product exists.

I know you have to flog them Matthew. But I don't see for the price they have a significant advantage.

Only the most expensive has a 1 db. sensitivity advantage, mine are more sensitive than the other two. My 3 db point is 100 Hz measured and calculated. I cross at 120 Hz. I have mine in a back box so it is sealed off above the ceiling. I suspect the spl. of my speakers are actually comparable to those given the sensitivity. Those speakers seem to handle my 100 watt amps fine. The FR of those speakers does not seem significantly better than my speakers.

As far as goals I think ours are different.

I don't want to localize to any speaker, except the center when there is only dialog. What I want is the illusion of being in a different space and not my room. That this system performs in uncanny fashion. That has been noted by many now. For this recent BBC Proms season with absolutely superb BBC engineering, I was transported the RAH Kensington night after night for two months. I have to also really commend the Dolby upmixer. It really can locate sounds other than the front accurately from a two channel signal. How it does that, I have no idea, but it does. Given the acoustic of the RAH, I think there was quite a bit of power on those ceiling speakers.

So at this time I remain highly skeptical that a ten grand outlay would bring any benefit. In fact I suspect it may well be a downgrade.

So, I would heartily recommend those CHN 110 drivers as Atmos speakers at a fraction of the cost of the Perlistens to members here.

 

[gene]

I know you have to flog them Matthew. But I don't see for the price they have a significant advantage.

Only the most expensive has a 1 db. sensitivity advantage, mine are more sensitive than the other two. My 3 db point is 100 Hz measured and calculated. I cross at 120 Hz. I have mine in a back box so it is sealed off above the ceiling. I suspect the spl. of my speakers are actually comparable to those given the sensitivity. Those speakers seem to handle my 100 watt amps fine. The FR of those speakers does not seem significantly better than my speakers.

As far as goals I think ours are different.

I don't want to localize to any speaker, except the center when there is only dialog. What I want is the illusion of being in a different space and not my room. That this system performs in uncanny fashion. That has been noted by many now. For this recent BBC Proms season with absolutely superb BBC engineering, I was transported the RAH Kensington night after night for two months. I have to also really commend the Dolby upmixer. It really can locate sounds other than the front accurately from a two channel signal. How it does that, I have no idea, but it does. Given the acoustic of the RAH, I think there was quite a bit of power on those ceiling speakers.

So at this time I remain highly skeptical that a ten grand outlay would bring any benefit. In fact I suspect it may well be a downgrade.

So, I would heartily recommend those CHN 110 drivers as Atmos speakers at a fraction of the cost of the Perlistens to members here.

Seeing how the Mark Sota were one of the worst performing speakers we've reviewed in almost 25 years, we don't get behind your recommendation on this point. A fullrange low output driver with uneven off-axis response is not an alternative equivalent to what Perlisten is doing here.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

I have no horse in this race. I'm just confused about the real importance of power handling in a surround application. I'm assuming the surrounds will be band-limited in the bass and for cinema will be producing mostly spatial effects. Is power handling really that important?

so Dennis…we meet again.

what you say used to be true for sure. It’s not anymore. Atmos moved all speaker channels to full range and changed fundamentally how panning is handled. One is the side effects of this is that high dynamic range full range content can easily be panned to any speaker. It would be up to the sound engineer to decide how this is handled. But if a helicopter flys overhead, it likely would be a very loud wide bandwidth effect largely relying on the tops.

music Has also complicated this. Music can now place any instrument with any bandwidth into any channel. What Gene and I find is that includes placing instruments into the tops.

yes the bass management helps this all some. But even a full range driver with an 80hz high pass couldn’t correctly reproduce the above mentioned scenarios. We can debate how smart these new mixing choices are. But the system design is about reproducing artist intent. Disagreeing with the artists intent is something all together different.

so today we are stuck in a situation where the ceiling speakers need to do more than they used to. As Atmos has evolved it seems their original potential is being more utilized. In fact a lot of sound engineers take real offense to referring to them as atmospheric effects because they are using them for so much more now. The technical dynamic range they need to reproduce between 80hz and up is 102dB. It’s a lot.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

I know you have to flog them Matthew. But I don't see for the price they have a significant advantage.

Only the most expensive has a 1 db. sensitivity advantage, mine are more sensitive than the other two. My 3 db point is 100 Hz measured and calculated. I cross at 120 Hz. I have mine in a back box so it is sealed off above the ceiling. I suspect the spl. of my speakers are actually comparable to those given the sensitivity. Those speakers seem to handle my 100 watt amps fine. The FR of those speakers does not seem significantly better than my speakers.

As far as goals I think ours are different.

I don't want to localize to any speaker, except the center when there is only dialog. What I want is the illusion of being in a different space and not my room. That this system performs in uncanny fashion. That has been noted by many now. For this recent BBC Proms season with absolutely superb BBC engineering, I was transported the RAH Kensington night after night for two months. I have to also really commend the Dolby upmixer. It really can locate sounds other than the front accurately from a two channel signal. How it does that, I have no idea, but it does. Given the acoustic of the RAH, I think there was quite a bit of power on those ceiling speakers.

So at this time I remain highly skeptical that a ten grand outlay would bring any benefit. In fact I suspect it may well be a downgrade.

So, I would heartily recommend those CHN 110 drivers as Atmos speakers at a fraction of the cost of the Perlistens to members here.

it’s pretty clear our goals are different. But I would give the counterpoint that I am actually highly skeptical that the Mark Audio driver is an alternative to the Perlisten outside of the fact that both make noise. It’s got a DI the shape of a hockey stick after it was fed into a wood chipper. It’s max output isn’t just well below that of the Perlisten, I think it is below what is reasonable. By my calculations you would be lucky to get 85dB at the listening position.
I also suspect the sensitivity difference is a lot larger than you realize. The Perlisten response is nearly dead flat. The Mark audio driver is not. If you flatten that out by knocking out peaks and then removing the HF rise, it looks like you would have about 85dB sensitivity.

My goal is to design and build high performance home theaters that are capable of approaching or achieving the artists intent. I just don’t see how you get there from here using the Mark Audio driver. It’s off axis behavior, bandwidth, and max output are all deal breakers for me.

 

[D Murphy]

so Dennis…we meet again.

what you say used to be true for sure. It’s not anymore. Atmos moved all speaker channels to full range and changed fundamentally how panning is handled. One is the side effects of this is that high dynamic range full range content can easily be panned to any speaker. It would be up to the sound engineer to decide how this is handled. But if a helicopter flys overhead, it likely would be a very loud wide bandwidth effect largely relying on the tops.

music Has also complicated this. Music can now place any instrument with any bandwidth into any channel. What Gene and I find is that includes placing instruments into the tops.

yes the bass management helps this all some. But even a full range driver with an 80hz high pass couldn’t correctly reproduce the above mentioned scenarios. We can debate how smart these new mixing choices are. But the system design is about reproducing artist intent. Disagreeing with the artists intent is something all together different.

so today we are stuck in a situation where the ceiling speakers need to do more than they used to. As Atmos has evolved it seems their original potential is being more utilized. In fact a lot of sound engineers take real offense to referring to them as atmospheric effects because they are using them for so much more now. The technical dynamic range they need to reproduce between 80hz and up is 102dB. It’s a lot.

That's interesting. Seeing as how I only get to use my own Non-Atmos HT about twice a year, it's not surprising I'm about a century behind on the technology. I also find it difficult to believe a single driver can perform as well as a carefully thought out multi-driver system. Someone recently drove down with a pair of $7000 towers that assigned most of the frequency spectrum to a 5" Tangband full ranger, with the expected underwhelming results. Fixing that has taken up a good bit of my time of late. But TLS Guy has me intrigued enough to give his driver a test drive. I'll have it here on Saturday.

 

[everettT]

Seems to be two different goals at play and both are good for their intended usage. Obviously one is more flexible financially and will be used more broadly implemented...

 

[shadyJ]

Seeing how the Mark Sota were one of the worst performing speakers we've reviewed in almost 25 years, we don't get behind your recommendation on this point. A fullrange low output driver with uneven off-axis response is not an alternative equivalent to what Perlisten is doing here.

The MarkAudio SOTA speakers were not great, but I will say that the midrange was very good. I would like to see those drivers used as wide-band midrange drivers, I think you would really have something there. However, they can not do low bass - I actually deformed a cone on the MarkAudio SOTA speakers with a test tone that went down to 30Hz, and that was from a 15-watt amplifier! The higher-end break-up modes were fierce too; they needed to be low-passed to an actual tweeter, not a smaller full-range driver.

I think if you put a couple of those MarkAudio 4" or 5" drivers into an MTM low-passed with a real tweeter and then high-pass them down to an actual bass driver or two, you could have a really good speaker.

 

[TLS Guy]

The MarkAudio SOTA speakers were not great, but I will say that the midrange was very good. I would like to see those drivers used as wide-band midrange drivers, I think you would really have something there. However, they can not do low bass - I actually deformed a cone on the MarkAudio SOTA speakers with a test tone that went down to 30Hz, and that was from a 15-watt amplifier! The higher-end break-up modes were fierce too; they needed to be low-passed to an actual tweeter, not a smaller full-range driver.

I think if you put a couple of those MarkAudio 4" or 5" drivers into an MTM low-passed with a real tweeter and then high-pass them down to an actual bass driver or two, you could have a really good speaker.

No you absolutely don't want to play low bass at power with those drivers. As you found out they oil can. That is why I cross my ceiling speakers over at 120 Hz. I can't even count the number of JW modules I rebuilt for people in years past. As I said this problem started with more powerful solid state amps. It did not happen when amps were 10 to 15 watt. Although I have to say this problem was by far a North American problem. In the UK and especially in Japan, where are lot were sold, this was an uncommon problem. I guess it is the flavor of music that North Americans favor that also has a lot to do with it. I did a large installation in Canada using 8 JW modules a side crossed at 500 Hz. It sounded superb and was used regularly for live music reinforcement.

 

[gene]

The MarkAudio SOTA speakers were not great, but I will say that the midrange was very good. I would like to see those drivers used as wide-band midrange drivers, I think you would really have something there. However, they can not do low bass - I actually deformed a cone on the MarkAudio SOTA speakers with a test tone that went down to 30Hz, and that was from a 15-watt amplifier! The higher-end break-up modes were fierce too; they needed to be low-passed to an actual tweeter, not a smaller full-range driver.

I think if you put a couple of those MarkAudio 4" or 5" drivers into an MTM low-passed with a real tweeter and then high-pass them down to an actual bass driver or two, you could have a really good speaker.

Or just start with better drivers

 

[TLS Guy]

Or just start with better drivers

How about these. They are for sale now.

They are a pair of flagons, with Mark III Jordan Watts modules.

On sale now.

 

[Eppie]

These speakers also make for easier installation. AFAIK the Mark Audio speakers are a bare driver only. I paid more for my Paradigms, but they came with a magnetic grill and have the flip out locking mechanism that many manufacturers use. I see the same style locking mechanism on the Perlistens. The grill is only 1/8" thick so looks almost flush to the ceiling. It's not really an apples to apples comparison though. The Perlistens are targeted at large private theatres with higher ceilings, hence the THX Dominus and Ultra certification. Those power levels would likely blow the 45W CHN-110 apart.

 

[TLS Guy]

These speakers also make for easier installation. AFAIK the Mark Audio speakers are a bare driver only. I paid more for my Paradigms, but they came with a magnetic grill and have the flip out locking mechanism that many manufacturers use. I see the same style locking mechanism on the Perlistens. The grill is only 1/8" thick so looks almost flush to the ceiling. It's not really an apples to apples comparison though. The Perlistens are targeted at large private theatres with higher ceilings, hence the THX Dominus and Ultra certification. Those power levels would likely blow the 45W CHN-110 apart.

That is probably true of the highest price one, but probably not the others. The power level of the Perlistens is quoted at 50 to 150 watts with crossover and 100 watts without, but sensitivity is 86db. The CHN 110 is 88.4 db. with a power handling of 45 watts full range. There is no quote with crossover, but I suspect it is at least 100 watts. Even if it only handles 45 watts the output is still comparable to all but the most expensive Perlisten. The way I use them crossed at 120 Hz, I doubt there would be much in it. In any case the price differential is colossal. I just don't believe that is a reasonable cost benefit ratio for a ceiling speaker. The price ratio is 20 to one for the cheapest and 50 to one for the most expensive. That is not an economic decision I would ever make.